With support from our Curestarters, Dr Tracy O’Mara and her team in Australia have created a new process to figure out a person’s risk of developing endometrial cancer. This scoring system could make the way we identify risk and ultimately prevent endometrial cancer more accurate and help more people who could otherwise have been overlooked.
This kind of research takes time, and it depends on people believing that investing in science today will lead to better outcomes in the future. I’m very grateful to everyone who makes that possible.
What is endometrial cancer and why is this research important?
Cases of endometrial cancer - the most common type of cancer found in the womb - are increasing, and we don't yet know why.
Endometrial cancer cells form in the lining of the womb, called the endometrium. Womb cancer as a whole is the 15th most common cancer globally, most often affecting people over the age of 40.
Endometrial cancer is usually diagnosed early and treated successfully, but cases worldwide have been increasing and we don't yet know why. And sadly, existing treatments for endometrial cancer can have lifelong effects on the patient’s health and fertility.
Taking these issues into consideration, there is a clear and obvious gap in care for these patients and a pressing need for more research into understanding endometrial cancer.
Dr Tracy O'Mara and her team believed that they could find a new way to predict who is most at risk of developing endometrial cancer.
Risk factors like BMI and obesity were already known to play a role, but they don’t tell the whole story - leaving many patients also at a higher risk of developing endometrial cancer in the dark.
With Curestarter support, the team ran the world’s largest genetic study of endometrial cancer, analysing data from over 129,000 patients and discovering several genetic risk factors linked to endometrial cancer development.
Using this genetic data, the team were able to create a scoring system called Polygenic Risk Score (PRS) that they could use to predict an individual’s endometrial cancer risk. Testing of this scoring system found that people with a high genetic score had a more than three times higher risk of developing endometrial cancer.
And inclusion of traditional risk factors like a high BMI found that individuals in these groups had an even higher risk of endometrial cancer. This scoring system, used alongside known risk factors like BMI, could therefore be game-changing in its potential to identify high risk individuals who would otherwise go undetected.
What could this discovery mean for endometrial cancer patients in the future?
In short - better risk prediction could help prevent more people from ever developing endometrial cancer in the first place.
This breakthrough provides the first evidence that genetics and body weight affect cancer risk differently. The team proved that combining the two risk factors significantly improves our ability to predict risk for endometrial cancer.
In the future, tools like this could form the foundation of a targeted, risk-based approach to stopping cancer before it starts. This new scoring system could be used alongside known risk factors to identify those at highest risk of developing endometrial cancer, and offer them preventative care and treatments that they would not have had access to otherwise.
Discoveries like this would not be possible without a united effort to start cures.
Our vision of seeing a day when no life is cut short by cancer is shared by many organisations, both in the UK and around the world. To maximise our impact and bring forward more new breakthroughs we are always looking to work with other cancer research funders.
We are so grateful to have been able to fund this project in collaboration with Cancer Australia. Funding partnerships like this provide us with the opportunity to use your donations more effectively and to champion more vital discovery research like this.
Thanks to this partnership, and to all of our Curestarters who continue to donate and raise crucial funds, we were able to fund Dr O'Mara's incredible team, supporting their curiosity all the way to a discovery that could change lives.
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