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IRELAND WILL BE the location of a world first in cancer research, it was announced today.
The Irish Cancer Society has said it has brought together Ireland’s leading breast cancer researchers in a new five year collaboration that aims for better treatments for breast cancer in Ireland.
Called BREAST-PREDICT, it is the country’s first Collaborative Cancer Research Centre and will see an investment by the society of €7.5 million over the next five years.
Most of Ireland’s leading breast cancer researchers will be involved, sharing resources and expertise in a project designed to predict the best treatment options for breast cancer patients.
Investment
The society’s investment of €1.5 million per year, for up to five years, is in order to join six research institutions and the All Ireland Co-Operative Oncology Research Group (ICORG) in a national collaboration.
It said that this will bring together the expertise and support of several entities in the areas of population-based, translational and clinical cancer research, and that all eight clinical cancer centres of excellence are on board.
The collaboration between over 50 Irish and world experts in breast cancer research will provide centralised access to resources, such as patient samples and technical expertise.
The ICS says this will “lead to an integrated breast cancer database and modelling of virtual cancer patients to track prognosis and therapy response”.
The first Irish Cancer Society Collaborative Cancer Research Centre will harness biological information to redefine how breast cancer is treated, with the ultimate goal of precision therapy – that is, more accurate and personalised approaches.
The ICS said the collaboration “will leverage the power of systems medicine or ‘holistic’ approaches to improve understanding of response and resistance to treatments”. It will also tackle factors which are hampering international progress in the breast cancer research arena.
These include access to tumour samples collected from the same patient over time in order to look at how tumours adapt, and improved insight into signalling networks within tumours.
Director of BREAST-PREDICT, UCD Professor William Gallagher said:
The ultimate goal of this research is personalised medicine, which allows us to tailor therapy towards individual patients based on the characteristics of their particular tumour and, thus, improve outcomes for breast cancer patients both in Ireland and worldwide.
Head of Research at the Irish Cancer Society, Professor John Fitzpatrick said that the centre “is by far the biggest thing the Irish Cancer Society has ever done in the area of cancer research in Ireland”.
He added that BREAST-PREDICT is the first in a series of such centres that will “lead large-scale international collaborative projects in the oncology area”.
The Irish Cancer Society has contributed more than €30 million to cancer research since 1963. During that period, more than 650 important research findings have been made.
Bodies
Professor William Gallagher, Director of the Irish Cancer Society Collaborative Cancer Research Centre BREAST-PREDICT, is an Associate Professor of Cancer Biology at University College Dublin.
The other bodies involved include Trinity College Dublin, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin City University, National University of Ireland Galway and University College Cork alongside the All Ireland Co-Operative Oncology Research Group (ICORG).
The €7.5 million investment by the Society will come entirely from fundraising, in part due to its Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign ‘Get the Girls’.
The ICS is encouraging everyone to share in the centre’s goal by fundraising on behalf of the Irish Cancer Society this October.
For further information on the Irish Cancer Society’s research programme, Collaborative Cancer Research Centre or to make a donation, visit www.cancer.ie/CollaborativeCancerResearchCentres or contact the Irish Cancer Society on Call Save 1850 60 60 60.
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Great News!
As a breast cancer ‘survivor’ this is brilliant news…Brenda leave the snarky comments for another time.
The very best of continuing good health to you and sincere congratulations on beating breast cancer.
Here here Joan…this can only be a very positive thing. Be it in Ireland or anywhere else in the world, the coming together of expertise to defeat this incidious disease is a great great thing. A cure will come in time…best of luck to you for the future.
Thanks Tony for the good wishes.
Thanks Mike for the good wishes its a hard one to cope with but sure I’m still here thanks to all the medics and all the treatment…
Excellent news, I love good news.
Fantastic news.
There will never be a cure for cancer it would cost the pharmaceutical industry way too much of a loss.
I don’t think you realise how difficult it is to come up with a cancer cure. Also, current treatments can cure if you get to it early, are lucky and/or you happen to have a curable type of cancer.
It’s not just pharma that researches these things. Universities also house many cancer research groups. As for the argument that there is no money in a cure, this is simply not true. People will always get cancer and people who have been cured can get it again. Having said that, it is extremely difficult to cure many types of cancer and it is likely that out treatments will continue to improve and the types with poor outcomes will become a chronic diseases and eventually be cured.
There is no such thing as a cure for cancer because there is no form of cancer and each type has different triggers.
Great news
It’s all good but surely the ultimate goal is to eradicate this and not just treat
Are there experts anywhere working on cures as opposed to treatments?
Are you mad? They’re selling chemo at 550,000 % markup than what it costs to produce the chemicals.
Just count how many times money is mentioned in this article.
More people make a living off of cancer than die from it and as long as it stays a for profit industry there’ll be no cure. Sure in the 60s we were a few million dollars away from a cure. The cure is a deception and they’ll continue using medieval treatments with a very controversial success rate of 3% for as long as they can get away with it- as doctors did a hundred years ago injecting mercury into people.
To think they call mammograms “prevention”. How is it prevention when
it’s already happened?
A predominantly plant based diet,
exercise and sunshine is the proven safeguard against cancer and all other chronic degenerative disease. But of course that’s boring. How can we make money off of that? No we need to invest in poisons. People need to stop this mentality that cancer is just bad luck and that cancer is an’enemy’ (always the need for an enemy). Cancer is a metabolic disease- a symptom of a much bigger underlying problem. A poor functioning immune system, thyroid, enzyme system and countless other protections your body has against it. There’s a lot of information about the medical industry I people would just care to look because you won’t hear it on RTE.
They are selling the time and expertise of all the people involved in the incredibly complex process of figuring out dosages, timings for treatments, and fall-back processes. They are selling the use of the equipment to infuse the drugs, the beds for the patient, the availability of doctors and nurses. They are paying for contingency plans and resources in case something goes wrong.
The cost of producing the chemicals is the least of it.
Do you really think that every cancer researcher is so corrupt as to cover up a potential cure of sunshine and fruit? I know two cancer researchers, brothers, one of whom went into it as he had cancer as a child and the other who went into it because his brother had cancer as a child. Do you think that if sunshine, exercise and fruit were enough that they would not be shouting it from the rooftops?
In fact I think that you will find that the majority of doctors will always recommend a healthy life-style… but it is NOT always enough. I know an top-class athlete (competed in the Olympics) who developed cancer. Sunshine CAUSES skin cancer.
Mammograms are talked about as early detection mechanisms not prevention. Early detection is extremely important in cancer and hugely boosts survival rates. Are you suggesting that they are some scam?
It seems to me that you instead of relying on peer-review, and scientifically robust research, are spouting some nonsense you heard in a dark corner of the interwebs. That is always the danger of such a free-publishing platform like this… you can find lots of “experts” talking out their holes. Their “learning” is then repeated by those who fail to apply any kind of critical thought to it.
I didn’t know this was a controversial subject was just looking to see if there are people looking into it. I am just trying to help a relative.
I wish your relative well Kevin and I hope he/she get good treatment.
I think the point people are trying to make is that cancer is different to something like AIDS or TB where there is an actual agent which causes the condition and where research can be done on that agent to prevent it from working. There are a huge number of different factors which can lead to cancer and different triggers for different forms of cancer. So it would seem very unlikely that we might find a “magic bullet” solution. There is reasearch going on into the causes of cancer but in the meantime reasearch should also continue into producing more effective treatments which can lead to better outcomes for those who are currently affected. One doesn’t have to preclude the other.
@Kevin – sorry my reply was to Daniel.
In relation to your question, most researchers are working on treatments. These treatments can become cures as well, as most of them attack the ability of a cancer to access the bodies resources, thus starving it.
Sorry Dennis but you just echoed my point. If cancer was gone tomorrow all of these jobs would be be lost, which is why the search for a cure is a deception. There will however always be treatments which ironically are carcinogenic. They treat sick bodies with poisons.
And there are people shouting it from the rooftops- very loudly and it’s catching on.
Dr. Cedric Garland and his team from the University of San Diego have been doing research for 30 years on vitamin D and found that it can reduce the risk of 4 out of 5 cancers, including prostate and breast, by 50%. That’s taking vitamin D in isolation. If you combine with other factors like additional nutrients and exercise that figure skyrockets to the point where cancer is statistically impossible.
Unfortunately this research is ignored by the medical community because vitamins are not patentable (they’re a naturally occurring molecule) and therefore not worth the cost to manufacture them.
“Sorry Dennis but you just echoed my point. If cancer was gone tomorrow all of these jobs would be be lost, which is why the search for a cure is a deception. There will however always be treatments which ironically are carcinogenic. They treat sick bodies with poisons.”
A cancer cure would not mean cancer would be gone. It would mean that when you get it, it could be cured. Therefore the economic incentive remains.
I don’t think you realize how difficult it is to come up with new cancer treatments. Also, current treatments can cure if you get to it early, are lucky and/or you happen to have a curable type of cancer.
Having said that, it is extremely difficult to cure many types of cancer and it is likely that out treatments will continue to improve and the types with poor outcomes will become a chronic diseases and eventually be cured.
Dennis I love it…your saying what I want to say…but so much better!
Daniel, if they cure one type of cancer there are hundreds more. If they find a cure for ALL cancers there is STILL a need for all of the above in order to administer the cure. If ALL cancers could be cured with a really simple solution that could be administered at home, then there are still thousands of other sicknesses which these highly skilled people can turn their expertise toward.
Yes some nutrients have great success in reductions of certain types of cancer. Things like increases fruits high in anti-oxidants and reductions in comlpex trans-fats etc… have been widely touted in the media. However these just REDUCE the chances of developing cancer… they do not eliminate the risk altogether.
Joan it is great news I didn’t say it wasn’t. My husband works in breast cancer research which he is very passionate about but he also agrees that finding a cure would destroy the pharmaceutical industry. And yes there are excellent treatments out there for those unfortunate enough to have to have it (I am a cervical cancer survivor so I know all too well how important the treatments are). But I disagree that treatments are equal to a cure.
Doesn’t matter Brenda. The Pharma industry do not have a monopoly on cancer research. Even if they did they would have to rely on thousands of good people keeping their mouths shut.
Exactly Dennis!
Wonderful news Liam Gallagher and team….please God a cure will come sooner than later…..xx
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