We're excited by the progress being made on the ICAN Study, which is looking at how cancer is diagnosed in those who have with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

Around 1 in 120 people in the UK have Inflammatory Bowel Disease.  The risk of IBD patients going on to develop colon cancer is approximately double that of unaffected people, for which reason IBD patients are enrolled in endoscopic surveillance to detect and treat early signs of cancer. 

The programme at St. Mark’s Hospital was the world’s first and remains one of the largest IBD endoscopic surveillance programmes in the world.   However, the surveillance approach could be improved if there was a more sensitive way to predict which patients have the highest risk of developing cancer.  At present for those with the most severe dysplasia (abnormal growth or development of cells), where there is a 1 in 2 chance of developing colon cancer, a common treatment pathway is a full removal of a patient’s colon and rectum.  For those with low-grade dysplasia there is a 30% chance of  developing colon cancer and therefore patients under go repeated screening colonoscopies and may also be offered removal of the colon. 

40tude is supporting a collaborative project between St. Mark’s Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research to develop less-invasive ways to accurately determine cancer risk for IBD patients.  As part of this pioneering programme, the ICAN team have been looking at how differing methods of endoscopic resection (in which a polyp or dysplasia is removed) reduced future cancer risk.  And in an exciting move to identify a genomic marker, the research team have recently been comparing the chromosomes of those who developed cancer with those who did not, in which there are some notable variations. 

“We have been looking at samples of polyps removed from patients with ulcerative colitis during endoscopy, and have now sent these for DNA sequencing,” explains Dr. Jennifer Fisher, ICAN Study Research Fellow.  “The bioinformatic analysis of the polyp and the surrounding tissue should allow us to confidently predict which dysplasia patients would go on to develop bowel cancer. It should allow us, therefore, to recommend alternative, materially less-invasive pathways for low risk patients. Those with the highest risk can be offered definitive treatment in the form of bowel removal surgery." 

We’re extremely grateful for the generous support of Dominic and Sarah Murphy, founders of the 8C Capital Trust, in helping to fund this important study, which looks set to inform the care of those who have an increased risk of developing colon cancer in the near future. 

We’ll be bringing you more news on the progress of some other 40tude-funded programmes soon, so please watch this space!  More about this ground-breaking work can be found here

Thank you for all your support, without which none of this would be possible.