25 years on the front line in the battle to beat cancer

It's safe to say it's not quite so popular here. But a group of researchers in York have found a possible use for an animal product that fine diners might turn their noses up at.

The team at the Jack Birch Unit, working in collaboration with researchers from Leeds University, have found a way of processing waste pig bladders in the lab. They've been able to dissolve out all the actual pig cells to leave behind a white, soft, elastic sheet made up of collagen - the main structural protein found in tissues.

This collagen sheet is both supple and very, very strong. And it could potentially have important uses in reconstructive surgery following human injury and disease.

It could be used to help repair or reconstruct a patient's diseased or damaged bladder, for example, explains the Jack Birch Unit's director, Professor Jenny Southgate. Once grafted across a diseased or damaged area of the bladder, it would be recolonised by the patient's own cells - forming a living repair. And there would be no risk of rejection, because all the cells would be the patient's own.

"It could really speed up the wound repair process," Prof Southgate says. And it could have other applications, too. "We could think about breast reconstruction, for example."

The Jack Birch Unit was set up in 1992 by local businessman and Lord Mayor of York, Jack Birch. Professor Colin Garner, one of the founders, was appointed the first research director.

In those early days, the unit's research focussed mainly on gastric, colon and gall bladder cancers. And cancer, mainly of the bladder, remains the focus today.

That's why one of the unit's core funders is York Against Cancer, which contributes £1 million every five years towards the research.

York Against Cancer itself is 30 years old this year, and the Jack Birch Unit is 25 - so this seemed a good time for the city's current Lord Mayor, Cllr Dave Taylor, and the rest of the civic party to pay a visit to find out about the research being done right here in York.

The Lord Mayor and civic party visit the Jack Birch unit

The Jack Birch Unit's approach to finding treatments for cancer differs from that of many other cancer research centres.

Instead of just studying cancer, the researchers here are interested in differences between healthy normal cells and cancer cells. This means they can look for ways to selectively target cancer cells while leaving the healthy normal cells untouched.

They are also trying to understand how cancers develop in the first place.

That involves growing cultures of healthy and of cancerous human bladder cells in the lab, and comparing how they behave, Prof Southgate tells the civic party.

And the Jack Birch team have found some very interesting differences. "In healthy tissue, the cells are organised," Prof Southgate says. There's a hierarchical structure of cells, all doing their own job as part of a larger organisation and communicating with each-other by way of chemical signals. "It's as though they're conforming to the rules of society."

Not so the cancer cells. "They grow more like weeds. They're the same kind of cells, but they show anti-social behaviour by no longer listening to instructions."

There's an obvious line of research here, therefore. It is unlikely that those cancer cells be 'retrained' to follow orders and behave like healthy cells again, Prof Southgate admits. "But if we can understand why the cancer cell is behaving in a particular way, we can target it with specific drugs."

Research technician Ros Duke and Lord Mayor Cllr Dave Taylor study images of cells on a computer screen

That's just one line of research the Jack Birch team is pursuing.

Others, such as that interesting use of pig's bladder, are not necessarily directly related to curing cancer itself, but are more about finding new ways of repairing patients' damaged or diseased bladders, whether that damage is caused by cancer or not.

They're also looking at the carbohydrate-rich 'sugar coating' that lines the bladder to understand if it plays a role in protecting the bladder against toxins and bacteria in the urine. The hope is that one day this could lead to ways of helping people with painful bladder diseases or recurrent urinary tract infections, Prof Southgate says.

Ultimately, the aim is to increase our understanding of cancer and other diseases of the bladder and urinary tract, so that better, more effective ways of treating them can be found.

Because the research often requires different approaches and techniques, much of the work is done in collaboration with NHS clinicians and with researchers from other disciplines and other universities: molecular geneticists and bioinformaticians from the Institut Curie in Paris, for example; bioengineers from the University of Leeds; and, closer to home, specialists in mass spectrometry from the University of York's Department of Chemistry.

Battling cancer: research projects members of the Jack Birch team are working on

Tissue repair

Researchers have found a way of introducing scratch wounds into cultures of healthy cells taken from the lining of the human urinary tract which have been grown in the lab. They then use time-lapse microscopy (essentially time-lapse photography using powerful microscopes) to study how quickly these wounds repair themselves. They have found that calcium plays an important part in the process that enables cells to work together to repair the wound and have found that different drugs will accelerate or inhibit the repair process.

Bladder carcinogens

Yorkshire has a high incidence of bladder cancer that is possibly linked to its industrial past and the team have been exploring why this might be.

They have been studying how different chemicals from the environment or workplace that are excreted in the urine can affect normal urothelial (bladder) cells. This has shown that some pre-carcinogens in the urine can be activated by the bladder cells themselves.

Observing the behaviour of cancer genes Researchers at the Jack Birch Unit have found a way of using viruses to artificially introduce different genes into healthy bladder cells. By introducing suspected cancer activating or suppressing genes, they are able to get a better understanding of the exact way such genes influence cancer behaviour. They have found that certain gene changes cause normal cells to behave more like cancer cells, while other work being performed in collaboration with researchers at Huddersfield University has taken this further and found a way of selectively killing cancer cells whilst sparing normal bladder cells.

Bladder reconstruction

Using a membrane derived from pig's bladder is just one technique the Jack Birch team is developing for repairing or reconstructing diseased bladders.

Another method they are working on is called composite cystoplasty. This involves grafting muscle tissue from the patient's bowel into the bladder, then lining the graft with cells grown in the lab from the patient's own bladder or urinary tract lining. The urinary tract cells form a barrier to urine, so protect the bowel graft (which can be damaged by urine) and thus reduce the side-effects (which includes a risk of cancer). The team has now joined forces with Professor Paolo de Coppi’s clinical team at the Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London to develop this pioneering new technique for patients.

Funding

The Jack Birch Unit receives core funding of £1 million every five years from local charity York Against Cancer. It also gets funding from a number of other sources, including currently the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Medical Technologies Innovation and Knowledge Centre and IMPRESS (Incontinence Management & PRevention through Engineering and ScienceS).