On 15th October our Celebrity Patron Peter Capaldi presented a cheque for £75,000 to help fund the research project led by Dr Claire Wells at King’s College London. Dr Wells is Leader of the Cancer Cell Invasion and Metastasis Group at Kings College; she and her team are investigating how breast cancer cells migrate to other parts of the body. They are working to find the proteins inside the cell whose activity either makes a cell move or can cause a cell to release other proteins that digest the surrounding tissue. By digesting the tissue around the tumour, cancer cells then have more space to move away and spread to new places.
Dr Wells explained the progress made by her team in understanding the partnership between a group of proteins as they work together to make cancer cells move. She stressed the vital nature of this research and the continuing need for more funding. Dr Wells then led a tour of her laboratory and gave more details about her research while showing cancer cells actually moving under the microscope. Dr John Maher, Clinical Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Immunology, who is working on the development of cellular immunotherapy for malignancy, led a second tour of his laboratory and talked about the aims of his research project.
