Research Spotlight – Summer 2014

Saving Faces continues to lead ground-breaking research to prevent disease and injury and find better ways of treating conditions affecting the face:

  • Surgery is still the mainstay of mouth cancer treatment. Our study on early mouth cancer, the first-ever surgical study in the UK, is now nearing completion. It is half funded by Cancer Research UK and half by Saving Faces and compares two widely used, but very different, surgical techniques for dealing with these cancers. Prof Anil D’Cruz (Director of Tata Memorial Hospital in India, one of the top mouth cancer centres in the world) has been running an almost identical study at his hospital. We are both keen to combine our data to make it the most powerful study on mouth cancer that has ever been done in the world. Our results are likely to define exactly how patients with this disease should be treated.
  • We are now ready to publish the results of 3 major national studies: our schools projects on the prevention of binge drinking and smoking; and our second National Facial Injury Survey studying over 8,000 facial injuries.
  • We are looking to partner The British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS), The Accident and Emergency consultants and the national charity dealing with domestic violence, REFUGE, to conduct research on how best to identify sufferers of domestic violence at an early stage when intervention would prevent escalation of this violence to horrific levels. Saving Faces’ ideas have already been presented in Parliament by Lord MacColl, former Prof of Surgery at Guys Hospital, discussed in a debate on domestic violence and written up in Hansard.
  • We have started talks with The Patients Association about collaboration around research to improve patient care.

We also fund PhD students and their supervisors. These are some of them and brief titles of their laboratory or psychology research:

Psychology PhD students presenting their research

  • The genetics of precancer and cancer – Dr. Teck Teh and Dr Waseem Ahmed
  • The identification and behavior of Cancer stem cells – Prof Ian MacKenzie
  • Chemical messengers (cytokines) produced in cancer, their association with depression and the negative feedback of this depression on life expectancy in cancer – Jo Archer
  • The psychological impact of cancer on patients’ families – Farah Shiraz
  • The psychological impact of facial trauma on patients’ families – Emmy Lou Rahtz
  • Pre-cancer genetics – Michael Ho
  • Cancer molecular biology – Jag Dhanda

If you want to find out more detail about the results of any of these projects please contact us.

Back