Dr Zoë Walters
University of Southampton
Awarded: £49,993
The challenge
Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumours (GISTs) are the most common type of sarcoma, affecting over 1000 people in the UK each year. These tumours can appear anywhere along the digestive tract but are most commonly found in the stomach. The majority of GISTs are small, benign and relatively harmless, but for a number of patients their tumours are more aggressive and behave like cancers. They will often return after surgical removal, resulting in a very poor prognosis. There is an urgent need to understand which patients will do well with treatment and which may have their cancer return so that these patients can be offered alternative treatments.
How will this project tackle this challenge?
As with many cancers, there are a variety of ‘normal’ cells communicating with and supporting the tumour, termed the tumour microenvironment (TME). The TME has been shown to help cancer cells grow even during treatment. In recent years the TME has been researched in numerous other cancers, but we understand very little about how it affects the growth and spread of GISTs.
New technologies have been developed that allow us to study the TME in much greater detail. We can find the location of each cell type within the tumour and study how they may be communicating with the cancer cells.
This project looks to use these technologies for GISTs for the first time. The team aim to create detailed maps of the features of GISTs, allowing them to identify key cell types and understand which genes are activated. The team will do this both for the ‘original’ tumour and from samples of those that have spread to other parts of the body. Comparing these maps will help them find differences in the TME between patients whose tumours are successfully treated and patients whose tumours return after treatment.
What this means for people affected by sarcoma
Improving our knowledge of which genes are activated in GIST could be crucial to developing better treatments for people whose sarcoma comes back after treatment. This small project is only a first step, but the team’s findings here will be vital to guide further, bigger, experiments in this space in the future.
