Francesco Boccellato, Leadership Fellow at the Oxford Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research has been awarded the Lee Placito Research Fellowship in Gastrointestinal Cancer.
The World Health Organization considers Helicobacter pylori a class 1 carcinogen and stomach cancer causes more than 700,000 deaths worldwide every year. Not every stomach cancer is associated with H. pylori, however, and the role of other risk factors remains unknown. It has been suggested that gastrointestinal reflux disease—in which gut juices move upward through the esophagus, causing pain and inflammation—is also associated with stomach cancer. Epidemiologists have observed that patients with some reflux conditions appear to have a higher chance of developing disorders in the stomach that relate to cancer.
Boccellato will use the Lee Placito Fellowship to further investigate the effect of reflux on the epithelium of the stomach, using an innovative 3D culture of the stomach layers called mucosoids.