Women with one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancerhave been offered new hope after a breakthrough by London scientists.
A team at King’s College London has found that targeted antibody therapies could bring long-awaited advances for those with “triple negative” breast cancer, which has fewer treatment options. This form of the disease accounts for 15 per cent of breast cancers.
It does not respond to hormone treatment, such as tamoxifen, or another commonly used drug, herceptin, leaving women to rely on surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
The research, which involves activating the patient’s immune system to attack the tumour, is at an early stage but the hope is that clinical trials could start after further laboratory work.
Dr Simon Vincent, director of research at the charity Breast Cancer Now, which funded the study, said triple negative breast cancer was “one of the greatest areas of unmet need in breast cancer”.
He added: “This is a really important discovery. We hope this new line of attack could now lead to a long-awaited targeted therapy for patients with aggressive triple negative breast cancer. Priming the immune system to attack tumours is an exciting approach that is now beginning to show promise in breast cancer, and we hope to see new antibody immunotherapies enter trials for triple negative patients soon.”
About 7,500 women a year in the UK are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. It is so-called because of the absence of three “receptors”, or proteins, in cancer cells: those for oestrogen, progesterone and human epidermal growth factor.
The study, published in Clinical Cancer Research, found that triple negative cancer expresses high levels of a receptor called folate receptor alpha (FRa).
‘I broke down after diagnosis... now we can start to hope'
Clover Lewis recalls discovering she had triple negative breast cancer after googling her medical results.
She sought help after finding a tiny lump but a mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy at University College Hospital failed to indicate anything suspicious. It was only after elective surgery to remove the lump that Ms Lewis, left, was told it was cancerous. Online checks showed it was triple negative breast cancer. “I completely broke down,” she said.
Ms Lewis, from Bromley, was under 40 at the time of diagnosis in 2010. She subsequently opted to undergo a mastectomy and breast reconstruction at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals.
She has been clear of cancer and founded a swimwear brand designed for women after breast surgery.
Ms Lewis said news of a potential breakthrough in treating the disease left her “literally speechless”.
She said: “It feels like other forms of treatment for breast cancer are miles in front. We, as triple negative breast cancer survivors or people with it, have not got that safety net. Now I feel like there is an opportunity to start experiencing hope. I have lost too many friends to triple negative breast cancer.”
This plays a crucial role in tumour growth but can be targeted with antibody immunotherapies. Dr Sophia Karagiannis, who led the study, said: “Having identified antibodies against this novel target that are able to restrict the growth of triple negative cancer cells in the laboratory, we are now concentrating on bringing forth a new generation of more effective antibody therapy approaches.”
A teenager who stabbed to death a 15-year-old boy in a murderthat was filmed and posted on Snapchat is facing life in prison.
The 17-year-old was in a pack of boys who chased and attacked Jordan Douherty when an overcrowded 16th birthday party got out of control.
As witnesses pulled out their phones to film the violence, Jordan tripped and fell to the ground where he was punched, kicked, and then stabbed through the heart.
Footage of the attack was quickly circulated on Snapchat, as paramedics tried to save Jordan’s life.
At the Old Bailey yesterday, the 17-year-old killer was convicted by a jury of murder. Two other boys, aged 16 and 17, were found guilty of conspiring to cause grievous bodily harm in the attack on Jordan.
Detective Chief Inspector Larry Smith, who led the investigation, said afterwards that the murder was for “absolutely no reason” as he called for an end to knife violence.
He said: “Those who carry knives must understand this is not a game, there is not a reset button and you cannot erase the consequences of using a knife.
“Young men are spending the best years of their lives in prison, while the friends they sought to impress slowly forget about them.
“Young men should understand what a life sentence really is, being caged, missing out on life and being released into a world that has passed them by.”
He added: “There is not a modicum of justification for this brutal killing and my heart goes out to Jordan’s family, who have been devastated by his death. The heartache for the family is a sentence that lasts forever.” The attack happened on June 23 when a schoolgirl’s 16th birthday party — which had been promoted on Snapchat — had to be shut down as the venue was dangerously overcrowded.
Jordan got into a confrontation with a group of boys outside the party at the North Romford Community Centre in full view of police officers who had been called to help disperse the crowd.
After an initial scuffle was broken up, he was chased by a large group of boys and then attacked. “Jordan posed no threat to anyone, and the use of a knife was wholly without even the beginning of a justification,” said Duncan Atkinson QC, prosecuting.
The three teenagers, all from east London, denied the charges. They will be sentenced next year alongside William Nayya-Welly, 20, of Romford, who admitted hiding the murder weapon.
After the killing, cafe owner Zubaer Chowdhury, whose flat overlooks the area, described the event as a “timebomb”. He said: “Young girls and guys were coming out drinking and smoking. It was just a matter of time before something happened … suddenly we could see hundreds of kids running in all different ways. Fifteen minutes later the police arrived. There were probably about 20 to 30 police cars and vans, with two or three dogs.”
One of Britain’s most senior prosecutors has warned that “a lot of guilty people” are escaping rape convictions because the rules make it “very, very difficult” to prove cases in court, and also because jurors tend to acquit defendants who present themselves well in the dock.
Ed Beltrami, one of London’s two chief crown prosecutors, said he could give an “absolute guarantee” that rapists who should have been jailed had instead walked free.
He said the main reason was that the law was “all against you” as a prosecutor and it was not enough to show sex had taken place without a woman’s consent. He added that the attitude of some jurors, that a person who “comes across well” and “looks the part” could not be a rapist, was a further obstacle.
“Most people think it’s a straight- forward thing: sexual intercourse without consent, it’s as simple as that, and if you believe the victim that’s the end of it. Not so,” he said in an interview with the Standard. “With murders and things, the task is normally can you prove that the person has done whatever it is. That’s normally it: did you do it? Rape’s not like that. It’s pretty difficult to convict people in those circumstances. I don’t think the public properly understand the complexities. Sexual offences are very, very difficult and deliberately so. I can guarantee a lot of guilty people have been acquitted. I can give you that absolute guarantee because it’s a very difficult standard of proof, particularly with rape.”
Mr Beltrami’s comments will intensify the debate about the way rape cases are dealt with by the justice system, amid conflicting claims that some innocent people are being charged and complaints from campaigners that too few offenders are being convicted.
They follow controversy over the collapse of a succession of cases in which the initial failure of police or prosecutors to disclose vital social media evidence to defence lawyers led to men wrongly put on trial for rape. That has led to suggestions that other innocent people could be in prison.
At the same time, women’s groups and politicians have expressed concern about the large gap between the number of rapes reported to police and the far smaller number of convictions.
Complaints have also been made about the impact which “rape myths” and stereotyped views of how women and men behave have on the decisions of jurors and police dealing with rape allegations.
Mr Beltrami, given a CBE last year for services to the law, said that although the conviction rate for rape in London had begun to rise again after a sharp fall last year, prosecutors continued to face a tough task. This was because even if jurors could be convinced a victim had not agreed to sex, a prosecution would still not succeed if the defendant could show he had a “reasonable belief” she had given her consent.
Mr Beltrami said that even if jurors could be convinced that a victim had not agreed to sex, a prosecution would still not succeed if the defendant could show that he had a “reasonable belief” that she had given her consent.
“The facts of what’s happened are normally right in front of you. The issue is what’s going on in the head of the defendant,” Mr Beltrami said.
“The complainant says I didn’t consent, but the hardest bit is did you [the defendant] reasonably believe that she consented?
“You could have a mistaken, but reasonable belief that she consented – you come along and say whatever she says I believed that in those circumstances she was consenting.
“The prosecution has to prove otherwise - to prove to the jury beyond reasonable doubt when he says that he didn’t really think that at all.
“Most people don’t realise that. You can completely believe the victim, believe that she did not consent, and you get over that hurdle and then the bigger hurdle faces you immediately and it’s a difficult thing to prove. What’s going on in the guy’s head?
“Did he actually believe that she was consenting at the time and if the jury think that he might have done, they’ve got to acquit, because you’ve got to prove it beyond reasonable doubt. So it’s all against you.”
Mr Beltrami said that jurors’ flawed perceptions of defendants and victims could also lead to mistaken verdicts.
“If the defendant comes across well, he looks the part, sometimes people are going to say he’s not going to commit a rape, that can’t be right.
“Alternatively, some defendants .. get rattled and they start come across all aggressive, they think that’s the very sort of person, I can well imagine that he would have raped this person.
“That’s the danger of the system. If you are going to have a trial by your peers .. the jury are going to use their own experience of life in assessing whether they believe someone or not. Some of the techniques that they use can be misleading.”
Mr Beltrami said that despite such failings, he believed the current system was the best available. It was also important to ensure that the law protected against wrongful conviction.
He added: “When people say the conviction rate is low, maybe they should have a thought for where the law is and how difficult it is when those are the rules we play by.
“I’m not necessarily saying they are wrong: it would be a terrible thing for someone to be wrongly convicted of rape. It’s one of the worst offences because you are suddenly labelled a rapist. It’s ruined your life.
“We’ve got to be absolutely sure that when people have been convicted that it’s right to do so and the law is very strict on it, rightly so, but don’t complain that the conviction rate isn’t very high because that’s the price you pay.”
Rape convictions in London fell by 27 per cent in the 12 months to the end of March, to 364. But 16,241 rape cases were recorded in the capital over the two years to the end of October.
Staff reporter,London(wp/Reuters): U.N. rights experts called on British authorities on Friday to allow WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to leave the Ecuador embassy in London without fear of arrest or extradition.
The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention reiterated its finding published in February 2016 that Assange had been de facto unlawfully held without charge in the embassy, where he has now been holed up for more than six years.
He initially took asylum to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That investigation was dropped.
Assange, whose website published thousands of classified U.S. government documents, denied the Sweden allegations, saying the charge was a ploy that would eventually take him to the United States where prosecutors are preparing to pursue a criminal case against him.
Britain says Assange will be arrested for skipping bail if he leaves the embassy, but that any sentence would not exceed six months, if convicted. It had no immediate comment on the experts’ call, but in June, foreign office minister Alan Duncan said Assange would be treated humanely and properly.
“The only ground remaining for Mr Assange’s continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post facto justify the more than six years confinement that he has been subjected to since he sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador,” the U.N. experts said in a statement.
“It is time that Mr Assange, who has already paid a high price for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of opinion, expression and information, and to promote the right to truth in the public interest, recovers his freedom,” they said.
Lawyers for Assange and others have said his work with WikiLeaks was critical to a free press and was protected speech.
The experts voiced concern that his “deprivation of liberty” was undermining his health and could “endanger his life” given the disproportionate amount of anxiety that has entailed.
Ecuador in October imposed new rules requiring him to receive routine medical exams, following concern he was not getting the medical attention he needed. The rules also ordered him to pay medical and phone bills and clean up after his cat.
Assange has sued Ecuador, arguing the rules violate his rights. An Ecuadorean court on Friday upheld a prior ruling dismissing Assange’s suit.
“We have lost again,” said Carlos Povedo, Assange’s attorney in Ecuador, adding that the legal team would consider bringing a case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
British restaurant and hotel owner Whitbread Plc (WTB.L) said on Friday it has received clearance from the European Union for sale of the Costa coffee chain to Coca-Cola Co (KO.N).
Whitbread said it now expects the deal to close in January next year and will implement a new 500 million pound share buyback programme after the deal close. (reut.rs/2BzA3A1)
Staff reporter(wp/Reuters): London’s Gatwick Airport reopened on Friday after a mystery saboteur wrought 36 hours of travel chaos for more than 100,000 Christmas travellers by using drones to play cat-and-mouse with police snipers and the army.
Sussex police made two arrests late on Friday in connection with the disruption and urged the public and passengers around the airport to remain vigilant.
After the biggest disruption at Gatwick since an Icelandic volcanic ash cloud in 2010, the airport had said around 700 planes would take off on Friday, although there would still be delays and cancellations.
Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, briefly closed again on Friday to investigate a new drone sighting but was soon operating as normal.
“Flights have resumed,” a spokeswoman said. “The military measures we have in place at the airport have provided us with reassurance necessary to re-open our airfield.”
Britain deployed unidentified military technology to guard the airport against what transport minister Chris Grayling said were thought to be several drones. “This kind of incident is unprecedented anywhere in the world,” he said.
The motivation of the drone operator, or operators, was unclear. Police said there was nothing to suggest the crippling of one of Europe’s busiest airports was a terrorist attack.
Gatwick’s drone nightmare is thought to be the most disruptive yet at a major airport and indicates a new vulnerability that will be scrutinised by security forces and airport operators across the world.
The army and police snipers were called in to hunt down the drones, thought to be industrial-style craft, which flew near the airport every time authorities tried to reopen it on Thursday.
No group has claimed responsibility publicly and police said there was no evidence another state was involved.
Sussex Police Assistant Chief Constable Steve Barry said they were keeping an open mind about who was responsible.
“In terms of the motivation, there’s a whole spectrum of possibilities, from the really high-end criminal behaviour that we’ve seen, all the way down to potentially, just individuals trying to be malicious, trying to disrupt the airport,” he said.
After a boom in sales, unmanned aerial vehicles have become a growing menace at airports across the world. In Britain, the number of near misses between private drones and aircraft more than tripled between 2015 and 2017, with 92 incidents recorded last year.
THERMAL IMAGING?
The British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA) said it understood “detection and tracking equipment” had been installed around Gatwick’s perimeter.
BALPA said that it was extremely concerned at the risk of a drone collision. Flying drones within 1 km (0.6 mile) of a British airport boundary is punishable by five years in prison.
The defence ministry refused to comment on what technology was deployed but drone experts said airports needed to deploy specialist radar reinforced by thermal imaging technology to detect such unmanned flying vehicles.
Other ways to tackle them is typically by frequency jamming that can disable or disrupt control signals and the GPS signals that allow the drones to navigate.
The Telegraph newspaper had reported earlier that the perpetrator had circled the drone around the airport building and flashed its lights. A description of the drone by witnesses had enabled experts to determine the model of the machine, according to the report.
The drone sightings caused misery for travellers, many sleeping on the airport floor as they searched for alternative routes to holidays and Christmas family gatherings.
Flights were halted at 2103 GMT on Wednesday after two drones were spotted near the airport. The disruption affected at least 120,000 people on Wednesday and Thursday but flights were restarted at 0614 GMT on Friday.
At 1740 GMT flights were suspended again but restarted less than an hour later.
It was not immediately clear what the financial impact would be on the main airlines operating from Gatwick including easyJet, British Airways and Norwegian.
Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said it considered the event to be an “extraordinary circumstance” meaning airlines are not obliged to pay compensation to affected passengers.
Airlines will have to refund customers who no longer wish to travel, however, and try to reschedule flights to get passengers to their destinations.
Some airport staff handed out chocolate and Christmas elf toys to stranded passengers.
Some, like Sarah Garghan-Watson, chose to stick it out at the airport overnight, having arrived at 8 a.m. on Thursday.
“It’s now 2 o’clock in the morning at Gatwick, and it’s very bright and very noisy. It’s now also very cold,” she said in a video shown on Sky.
“All I can see tonight ... is a sign that says ‘no more sleeps until the beach’. And here we are, sleeping, in the stairs at Gatwick, because there’s no flights.”
