00.00 Exterior
Medical School
CU
Sign
CU
Lymph cell bottle
Ws
researcher at microscope
Tilt
up to samples
Guide Voice: A discovery by
researchers at the University of Birmingham may bring new hope to
the 10,000 people in the UK alone, who are diagnosed with a
Lymphoma – cancer of the white blood cells, each year.
Beginning with the premise that the brain and the immune system
actually talk to one another, they started researching whether
chemicals known to affect the brain, could have an impact on the
immune system and the cancers that arise from it.
00.22 SOT Professor John Gordon,
Medical School, University
of Birmingham -“It
really started, this whole study on showing that these cancer cells
of the immune system, the lymphoma cells, responded and took up the
chemical known as Serotonin. This is the happy hormone, the one
that keeps us happy. We were a bit surprised that the cancer cells
in the blood should be doing that as well, but knowing that it
meant we have potential drugs that could act as therapy perhaps in
killing or stopping these lymphoma cells from growing, so
that’s when we started to test the different ones that are
out there, that work in this system.”
00.58 Tilt
down ‘scope
CU
samples BCU samples
Backed by the Leukaemia Research Fund, researchers began testing
various drugs like anti- depressants and amphetamine derivatives
and measuring their impact on cancerous cells.
01.08 SOT Dr Nick Barnes, Reader in Neuropharmacology
- “We have been taking cell lines, which are
representative of lymphomas, and then we’ve been adding
various drugs which target proteins to seratonin, recognising
seratonin. And we’ve been identifying whether these drugs can
actually stop the tumour cells from dividing, from
growing.”
01.24 SOT Professor John Gordon
- “What we found was among a wide range
of different types of Lymphoma that we grow in a test tube, MDMA,
which most people know as ecstasy, can actually stop the cells
growing. Now that builds on previous studies that we’ve done
on Prozac- Prozac seems to do pretty much the same thing. So now
we’re finding 2 drugs that are having the same effect and
that will give us really good clues as to how they’re
working.”
01.51 Lymph
cells pipette
Pan
to samples
John
pippetting
Nick
at ‘scope
Guide Voice: In over half of the 17 Lymphoma
samples studied growth stopped or was significantly slowed by the
various drugs including the amphetamine derivatives. Of the drugs
investigated, the discovery of Prozac’s impact on cancer
cells is likely to have the most immediate impact, because it has
already been extensively tested and has a good safety record.
02.12 SOT Professor John
Gordon - “We’re talking to
people about getting the Prozac into formal clinical trials, so
hopefully with the right funding behind us we’ll be able to
test whether what we see in the test tube really works in patients,
because of course that is our ultimate goal.”
02.28 CU
pipette & samples
Guide Voice: The applications of the Ecstasy
discovery are not so straightforward as it was tested in liquid
form in strong doses…
02.37 Dr Nick Barnes - “The
concentrations of Ecstasy required are far too high to use in the
patient, indeed they would almost immediately kill the patient,
however if we can tease apart the mechanism of action for the
ecstasy to stop the tumour cells from growing, away from the
psychotropic actions of ecstasy, which is why people abuse the
drug, then we may be able to identify a more appropriate drug to
stop the lymphoid tissue."
03.02 Petrie
dishes & Scope
Guide Voice: The next stage of the research
into Ecstasy is to actually identify how it is causing these cells
to stop growing.
03.09 SOT Professor John Gordon - “We
need to really understand the mechanism. So we need to probe deeper
into how these drugs are killing the cells, and then possibly with
the example of MDMA/Ecstasy, by re-designing that designer drug, we
might have an effective therapy for at least some of these
patients.”
Ends 03’
28”
03.31 Additional
Material
(Researcher takes samples from scope, Pull focus samples,
samples in light)
