The Bowelbabe Laboratory - Studying ‘mini bowels’ to understand what goes wrong when cancer develops 

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In October 2024, we announced a £1.6m commitment towards cutting-edge science at the Francis Crick Institute. This £1.6m donation will see researchers in The Bowelbabe Laboratory led by Professor Vivian Li, study lab-made ‘mini bowels’ to aid the development of new, more targeted treatments for bowel cancer.  

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To keep our bowels healthy and functioning correctly, our bodies constantly replenish the cells that line the inside of our bowel. This process involves a special type of cell called stem cells, which have the ability to transform into many different cell types. Not only that, these shape-shifting cells can also produce copies of themselves making them ‘immortal’.

 

Professor Li’s lab team want to find out how these stem cells are controlled in healthy bowels and what happens when they go wrong, which leads to bowel cancer. The researchers are particularly interested in a biological messenger called Wnt, which sends signals to the stem cells to keep them growing and multiplying correctly. Overactive Wnt signals are found in many bowel cancers, causing the stem cells to grow out of control and form a tumour.  

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The team have developed a nifty way to study stem cells and these biological signals using ‘mini bowels’ created in the lab. The ‘mini bowels’, called organoids, are three-dimensional clumps of cells that form tiny models of our bowels. In these models, the researchers can alter the levels of Wnt and other important signalling molecules to see what role they are playing.  

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Excitingly, the lab’s work is revealing interesting insights about the role of Wnt and stem cells in healthy bowels, but also what happens when bowel cancer develops. In the future, this could help develop new, targeted treatments to give more people affected by cancer more time with the people they love.