Proud to have Sir Bobby on her team

Mar 27 2008 by Paul James, The Journal

Sir Bobby Robson has launched a £500,000 cancer fundraising mission in thanks to Newcastle doctor Ruth Plummer for saving his life. Chief reporter Paul James meets the future director of the football legend’s cancer research centre.

EIGHTEEN years ago, a unit was created at Newcastle General Hospital where doctors began testing new cancer treatments on patients for whom standard chemotherapy was having no effect.

These days those medics are at the forefront of new techniques to battle cancer, with experts in their field all based on Tyneside and forming part of the Northern Centre for Cancer Treatment, one of the largest places of its kind in the country.

Every year, 600 new cancer patients arrive at the centre. Up to 150 of those are referred for experimental treatment from the trials team which developed Alimta – the only treatment for mesothelioma, which is caused by asbestos.

This year they started the first clinical trials to treat women with advanced breast and ovarian cancer caused by a faulty gene. The tests could eventually protect all women at risk of the cancer.

So it may come as a surprise that Professor Hilary Calvert, director of the Northern Institute for Cancer Research, and Dr Ruth Plummer, senior lecturer in medical oncology at Newcastle University, work from an office converted from a baby delivery suite.

Outside the General, the team who analyse the results of the trials are based in portable buildings. Later this year they will have a home worthy of their groundbreaking, lifesaving work, however, when the new Northern Centre for Cancer Care opens at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital.

Their new home will include treatment and consulting rooms, a laboratory, a data handling office and an area in which to prepare patients for chemotherapy. But at present there is no equipment, and that is where the North East’s most inspirational footballing son enters the story.

Currently fighting cancer for the fifth time in 15 years, Sir Bobby Robson credits Dr Plummer with saving his life. So last year when she asked him for ideas on raising money for new equipment, he responded in typical fashion.

He has set up a charitable foundation with the aim of raising at least £500,000 to equip what will become the Sir Bobby Robson Cancer Trials Research Centre.

The gratitude shown by the former Newcastle and England manager to Dr Plummer, who will lead the new trials centre, is reciprocated. She said: “We’re going to have a state of the art facility to increase our ability to offer new cancer drug trials to patients in the North East.

“Having Sir Bobby on board is the thing that’s largely going to make it happen. I asked him whether or not he could suggest any contacts. We didn’t expect him to so generously decide he’d give up his time for this. He went away with the literature and said it was something he and Lady Elsie (his wife) would like to do.

“They have already been keen supporters of us; they can see what progress there has been in the North East in terms of cancer care and they’ve generated so much enthusiasm and support.

“He’s said he’s going to give up his 75th year for the North East and for cancer – it’s just amazing – and not at all what I expected when I first spoke to him.

“He has made the difference and this will happen now. We’ve every confidence he will do this. It’s fantastic for North East cancer patients to see somebody like this getting involved and being prepared to say, ‘I’ve had it and we can fight it’.”

Typically there are between five and eight “phase one” trials at the General at any one time. There is a similar number of phase two trials, involving the more promising treatments from previous tests. Even at this stage the treatments have been years in the making. The phase one study of a drug to treat hereditary tumours started this year, but its development began in 1990.

The new centre will give Dr Plummer and her colleagues the capacity to run twice as many trials.

She said: “We felt that within the North East we needed that capacity. Certainly we’re getting the numbers of patients interested to do that. All the patients on phase one have had the standard treatment and say, ‘Is there anything else’?

“There is an element of hope, but most of my patients say to me, ‘I know I won’t benefit from this, but somebody in the future may’. It is an incredible group of people who come forward.”