What issue does this study address, and how could the results help patients?
When bowel cancer recurs after initial treatment, it is often resistant to currently available therapies. Bowel tumours have been found to have higher levels of sodium ions compared to healthy surrounding tissue. Sodium levels and more sodium channels have been shown to increase the invasiveness of breast cancer, and the research team hypothesise this may also be the case in bowel cancer.
Examining changes to sodium channels in bowel cancer could open up new types of treatment for patients with recurrent tumours who currently have very limited options.
The research team
This study is led by Dr William Brackenbury at the University of York.