A LEADING light in the fight against cancer from the University of York has been handpicked to head up part of a national team battling the disease.

York’s Professor Norman Maitland, the director of university’s cancer research unit, will lead one of four research groups, each of which is made up of a team of experts.

Cancer Research UK and its commercial arm, Cancer Research Technology (CRT), have set up the teams of scientists, who have expertise in cancer stem cell research.

The charity wants them to collaborate on an initial two-year research project to unravel the role of cancer stem cells in the development, growth and spread of tumours in breast, prostate and head and neck cancers.

It was previously thought that all the cells within a tumour are the same, but it is now known a small number of slow-growing cells do not respond to standard treatments. These “cancer stem cells” are thought to be a cause of resistance to common therapies and the spread of tumour cells to other parts of the body.

Scientists do not yet know how cancer stem cells can be identified and killed.

Prof Maitland said: “In York we have developed the means to obtain stem cells from prostate cancers, now the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, and the properties of these do indeed suggest that they form this treatment-resistant core.

“We now want to explore the molecular properties that allow the cancer stem cells to survive and resist treatment, using several different strategies, and we hope the work generated by our experts, together with other world-class researchers, will increase the information available to scientists in this important area.

“By doing so we hope to develop new generation drugs, perhaps even patient-specific drugs, to target cancer stem cells. Since cancer stem cells are designed for long-term survival, we aim to dissect these survival mechanisms in order to block them, thus targeting the root of the cancer.”

Initially the project will receive £500,000 from Cancer Research UK for two years. It is hoped each research team will attract an industry partner to bring in additional skills, know-how and more funding for longer-term research.