Kidscan Research and the Heart

Scientific knowledge gained by research into childhood cancer, can also feed into research about other diseases, and vice versa.  

As February is National Heart Month, we are highlighting one of our Kidscan researchers currently focused on childhood cancer research, but he started off working in a very different field.  

Dr David Greensmith and his team are based at Salford University:  

“My background is in heart and heart disease-based research. While I am certainly no expert in the field of cancer biology – for example how and why cancer develops and spreads – I am aware of the importance of research that seeks to cure childhood cancer.  

At first, it may seem strange that someone who researches the heart is working on a cancer-based project. But by using my expertise in heart-based research, and exploring how drugs used to treat cancer affect the heart in cancer patients, I hope to make important contributions to the fight against cancer. “ 

One of Kidscan’s ambassador Siobhan is now 35. She was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma when she was 16 and needed an operation to remove all of her ribs on one side, half of a lung and part of her diaphragm. She then had to have a year of chemotherapy and radiotherapy:  

“[after treatment] I ended up with heart failure and I had a heart transplant. They did my first heart scan when I was 20, I remember mum coming with me and they could see the onset of the heart failure. They said because of the chemo, it can cause heart failure.  

I didn’t understand what that was. I thought if your heart fails, you die. I had the transplant in 2015. I can’t remember that [heart failure] being mentioned as a late effect.”

Coleen is another of our adult ambassadors, she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma (bone cancer) when she was 14. But the treatment used to save her life, led to life altering late effects as she grew older including fatigue, pain and heart problems: 

“In hospital for investigations I was diagnosed with tachycardia as well, so we knew the chemo had damaged my heart along with everything else. So it was a shock. There are still things going wrong and I realised that the longer out of treatment I am, the more side effects I’m getting and the more severe.” 

Dr Greensmith receives funding from Kidscan, he explained his work to us in more detail: “Anthracyclines are a type of drug used to treat childhood cancer. Thanks to drugs such as these, 80% of children with cancer now survive. However, many of these survivors go on to develop and even die from heart failure in adulthood. Today’s cancer patients become tomorrow’s heart patients and it isn’t clear why anthracyclines cause this.  

We do not currently have enough alternative treatments to simply stop using anthracyclines so we need to find ways to stop them causing heart failure. For this, we need to fully understand how anthracyclines affect the billions of cells that form the heart. This is because on every heartbeat, each heart cell contracts then relaxes allowing the whole heart to act as a pump. A rise and fall of calcium inside each cell underlie this.  

Our work seeks to provide a deep understanding of exactly how anthracyclines change cell calcium and contraction and why those changes occur. We may then be able to prevent those changes and so heart failure by treating patients who are given anthracyclines with existing cardiac drugs. It may also mean that children can be treated with higher doses of anthracyclines to improve their chance of cancer survival.” 

 “My approach is perhaps more indirect. Nonetheless, if my approach adds a new arm to cancer research and reduces the lethal side effects of existing drugs that we know are highly effective against cancer, I share with all cancer researchers a common agenda; reduce the number of lives lost to cancer.”