Cancer specialist given £880,000 for research

Jul 27 2007 by Liam Murphy, Liverpool Daily Post

A PHYSICIST at a Wirral cancer centre has been awarded £880,000 to help develop treatments for the illness.

Dr John Fenwick has received a Fellowship from Cancer Research UK to support him in his research work to help lung and head and neck cancer patients.

The money will fund six years of specialist radiotherapy research at the Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology.

Dr Fenwick said his work would be split into four key strands, two of which will hopefully help “fine tune” cancer treatments, one will allow British doctors to catch up on treatments offered in America, and a fourth strand which could offer dramatic improvements if it works.

He said: “I’m really pleased to receive this award. A lot of people put a lot of effort into raising money for Cancer Research UK, and now I have a huge responsibility to make these projects happen.

“This is quite a large project, and very live science so a big challenge will be to adapt plans when things don’t work exactly as expected.”

The grant will fund Dr Fenwick and an additional research physicist, together with some technical support, to carry out the work which will include a collaboration with other cancer centres in Glasgow, Cardiff, Sheffield, and Guys and St Thomas’s in London, assessing the effectiveness of radiotherapy treatments which deliver increased doses to lung tumours.

There will also be a study carried out in collaboration with researchers at Guys and St Thomas, Nottingham and Madison, using advanced scanning techniques to look at blood flow and cell growth in tumours.

The images collected will be analysed to explore whether high-precision radiotherapy techniques can be used to specifically target rapidly growing and poorly oxygenated tumour regions. There will be an analysis of the effects of radiation doses and timings on radiotherapy reactions in tissues which grow rapidly, such as the lining of the mouth.

The analysis will use techniques taken from mathematical biology and look to see whether higher doses can be safely delivered. The final strand will look at the development of a treatment called “Intensity Modulated Arc Therapy” which involves changing radiotherapy so that high doses of radiation are delivered to regions which more accurately match tumour shapes.

Dr Fenwick worked at Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology from 1998 to 2002 and returned in 2004 after spending a couple of years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Clinical Director of Radiotherapy at Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology Dr Brian Haylock said: “This funding is a major coup for our hospital. More than 4,500 new patients are referred to our centre for radiotherapy treatment every year and we offer some of the most modern and advanced treatment facilities anywhere in Europe.”

liammurphy