British professor makes ‘thrilling’ breakthrough for cancer that killed his mother

Professor Paul Workman was 37 and already well established as a medical researcher when his mother, Ena, died of a rare bone cancer known as chordoma. About one in a million people are affected by the condition, which is untreatable.

“It was utterly frustrating,” said Workman, who later became head of the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery and then chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research, London. “Thirty-six years ago, there was little we could do to treat chordoma. There was little understanding of the disease and no drugs were available to help my mother.”

That grim state of affairs could soon be about to change, however. Workman and his colleagues, working as part of an international collaboration, recently pinpointed a key protein, known as brachyury, which they realised was crucial to the survival of chordoma cancer cells in a patient’s body.

The discovery caused great excitement among researchers because it suggested a route for attacking chordoma: block the protein brachyury and this would damage the cancer cells whose growth it was promoting. All that was needed was a drug that could effectively attack the protein.

In a paper published in Nature Communications this month, Workman – with colleagues in Oxford and North Carolina – revealed that, after studying brachyury in unsurpassed detail, they had pinpointed several sites on its surface which could be used as targets for specially designed drugs.

This breakthrough was achieved by using one of the world’s most powerful generators of X-rays: the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Didcot, Oxfordshire.



Thrilling discovery

As a result of this work, Workman’s team has already been able to isolate several promising compounds that are now being used to create potential treatments that could attack brachyury and destroy the protein. In this way, doctors may soon be able to tackle chordoma, a condition that has until now resisted efforts to combat its growth and spread.

“It is thrilling to realise that I am now helping to do something about a disease that killed my mother. It has taken considerable effort by a lot of scientists from centres on both sides of the Atlantic but it has been worth it,” said Workman.

Crucially, the techniques now being developed to tackle brachyury and chordoma have wider potential and could be used to improve treatments for other, more common, cancers, added Workman. “For a start, brachyury appears to be involved in the metastatic spread of other tumours, which means that drugs that block its activities could also help to obstruct the spread of other cancers,” he added.