25 years ago, a team of our scientists were celebrating. Their risky strategy had paid off.
“You look back and you do wonder about how we decided to do this, and basically it was because we believed that it was better to do high-risk research that potentially would be important,” recalls team leader Professor Mike Stratton, “but with the full knowledge that, perhaps, the gene didn’t exist.”
But exist it did – in fact, the team had just pinpointed the location of what would become one of the most famous ‘cancer genes’ known to science – BRCA2.
And in the process, they opened the door to ways to give people more certainty about their risk of cancer and paved the way for new and better treatments.