Researchers in Belfast have made a groundbreaking discovery, which may improve survival rates for bowel cancer patients around the world.

The team from Queen's University has discovered a therapeutic process that can target and kill bowel cancer cells. The research, which has been deemed the first of its kind, centres on patients who originally present with a very poor survival outcome.

Around 2,500 people are newly diagnosed with bowel cancer in Ireland every year and around 1,000 people die annually, making it the second most common cause of cancer death in this country.

The research compared two groups of bowel cancer patients one year after their diagnosis. The first group was considered to be doing ‘well', while the other group had a poorer outcome.

The three-year project focused specifically on ‘gene signatures' to identify whether the stress response pathway of a specific group of cells could be a potential novel target for the treatment of a group of bowel cancer patients.

These patients had a poor survival outcome and/or were resistant to conventional cancer treatments.

The research focused on BRAF, which is a human gene that encodes a protein called B-Raf. This is involved in relaying signals from the surface of the cell, resulting in cell growth and survival. When mutated, this gene has the potential to cause normal cells to become cancerous.

"This research focused on an aggressive subgroup of colon cancers known as ‘BRAF mutants'. These cancers are not only extremely aggressive, but they do not respond well to conventional cancer treatments. Unfortunately this means patients diagnosed with a BRAF mutant cancer have a very poor prognosis.

"Our research has identified a cellular process that can be exploited in order to kill these cancer cells. Essentially, we can take advantage of the aggressive biology of these cancers and use it against them," explained lead researcher, Dr Nicholas Forsythe, of Queen's Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology.

He said that the process they identified is known as the Unfolded Protein Response (UPR).

"In normal cells, the role of the UPR is to help cells survive periods of stress. We observed that our cancer cells were under high levels of stress, due to growing much faster than normal cells, and they had ‘hijacked' the UPR in order to survive.

"Using a specific combination of drugs, we were able to overload this process and stress these cells to a point where they could no longer survive, dying in a process known as apoptosis - a form of cell suicide," Prof Forsythe noted.

The researchers pointed out that this is ‘good news for bowel cancer patients', as more clinical trials ‘could improve the survival outcome of patients with these colorectal tumours in Northern Ireland and beyond'.

The next step is to explore novel drugs, which it is hoped will improve the survival outcome of these patients.

Details of these findings are published in the journal, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.