Outstanding Achievement Award

A joint University study which investigated new approaches to treating cancers of the abdomen has secured worldwide recognition.

The World Congress of Oncology held in Athens earlier this month awarded its Outstanding Achievement Award to the School of Medicine's Professor Wen Jiang in collaboration with Peking University and Yiling Medical Research Institute.

On winning the award, Professor Wen Jiang, said: "We were very pleased with the award from the Congress.

"It is recognition of the joint efforts by the teams in Cardiff, Peking and Yiling of China in this multiple centre collaboration between the two countries.

"With the highly interesting findings, we are currently developing strategies to take the research into patients with peritoneal spread of cancer, who have little effective options for treatment."

The award winning research found that traditional medicine has the capability to reduce peritoneal metastasis in patients where it is frequently seen, such as gastrointestinal, pancreatic, stomach and ovarian cancers.

Over 60 per cent of patients with ovarian cancer and over 30 per cent of patients with pancreatic cancer will develop peritoneal metastasis, which leads to spreading in the abdominal cavity and can result in high mortality rates.

The study found that an extract from a Chinese medicine formula is able to reduce the peritoneal metastasis from gastric, colorectal, pancreatic and ovarian cancers; the prime mechanism for the medicine to work is reducing cancer cells that settle in the peritoneal cavity wall, by blocking certain types of protein interactions.

There have been few therapeutic options for effective treatment of this previously.

Regional and systemic chemotherapies and to some degree radiotherapy and target therapies have also been used on the patients, all of these have their limits.