Cash boost for breast cancer research

The Breast Cancer Campaign charity has awarded the money to Dr Ingunn Holen and Professor Claire Lewis who work at Sheffield University.

Dr Holen has received almost 200,000 to investigate the best way of combining breast cancer drugs.

During treatment, a breast cancer patient may receive several different types of drugs but very little is known about how the order or timings of the drug impacts on its effectiveness.

Dr Holen will aim to establish the best sequence and ideal time intervals for breast cancer treatments to give patients the best chance of beating the disease.

"The drugs in the study are all currently used to treat breast cancer,” said Dr Holen. “Therefore any positive data can lead to fairly rapid changes in clinical practice and patients will quickly see the benefits."

Meanwhile Professor Claire Lewis has been given 157,304 to investigate how the body fights infection and what happens to enable tumour cells to grow.