IGC researcher awarded Senior Cancer Research Fellowship | Institute of Genetics and Cancer

Dr Luke Boulter has been awarded a Senior Fellowship from Cancer Research UK for his work developing therapies for liver disease and cancer.

The £1.8 million award will fund two postdocs and a bioinformatician over the next six years on a project entitled ‘Dissecting the molecular origins of ductular carcinomas in chronic tissue disease and regeneration’.

Liver cancer is one of the fastest rising causes of cancer death in the UK and for the type of cancer Luke’s team works on, Cholangiocarcinoma, only one in 20 people survive a diagnosis for more than five years, providing an ongoing challenge to find treatments that are curative rather than palliative.

One part is going to be looking at how in chronic disease, cancer cells use the changes in tissue to start their growth and especially co-opt normal healthy regeneration for tumour genesis.
The other side of it is that the cancer we work with is most prevalent in South East Asia where patients infected with liver fluke get cancer because of that. We’re interested in whether patients in the West have similar or different early processes in tumour formation when we compare it to patients in South East Asia.
The aim ultimately is if we can identify high risk patient groups, we can devise therapies to treat the early stages of that disease rather than treat the tumour.

Luke, who was awarded a Cancer Research UK Career Development Fellowship six years ago, did his PhD in liver regeneration and was interested to find that the mechanisms cancers use to grow are also what we need to repair tissue.

Around eight years ago, he started collaborating with researchers in Thailand, which has some of the highest rates of liver cancer, to explore how fluke-driven cholangiocarcinoma evolves.

We have moved from trying to understand tissue repair to understanding what happens when we have got cancer. It’s very exciting to develop our work looking at early disease. That’s where the big treatment opportunities are.
A Career Development Fellowship allows you as a postdoc to transition to independence. The Senior Fellowships are about building on and expanding your international reputation.
It lets you exhale and do the science rather than chase funding. You can be on the front foot of everything and do the exciting experiments you want to do.

His group will use laboratory models that mimic injured tissues, alongside studies of mouse models and donated human samples, and will combine advanced technologies to examine individual cells and map where important changes occur within tissues.

By understanding how chronic disease creates a ‘cancer-friendly’ environment, this work aims to identify new warning signs that could enable earlier cancer detection. In the longer term, it may also lead to new preventive treatments that disrupt the tissue conditions cancer cells depend on, improving outcomes for people at high risk of developing cholangiocarcinoma.