Dr Mike Murphy, Childhood Cancer Research Group, University of Oxford

In September 2006 we awarded funding of £629,796, and then a further £182,082 in 2007, to the Childhood Cancer Research Group (CCRG) to support a five-year programme of work looking at the causes of childhood leukaemia.

The Group is world-renowned for its epidemiological studies on childhood cancer.

They hold the National Registry of Childhood Tumours, the world’s largest and most important national population-based childhood cancer registry which encompasses childhood cancer registrations across the whole of the UK and is considered virtually complete from 1962 to the early years of the 21st century.

Dr Mike Murphy, Director of the CCRG, explains the aims of the programme:

The nature of the molecular changes in the cells which give rise to leukaemia in children are increasingly well understood, but the provoking factors which cause them remain elusive. Few patterns in the occurrence of childhood leukaemia, beyond the frequencies with which the molecular changes are thought to occur, are universally agreed, and there are therefore few clues to go on.

"However, many would agree that the increase in occurrence of some kinds of childhood leukaemia in many countries in the second half of the century is at least partly real and is wholly disturbing.

The science of epidemiology seeks particularly to disclose patterns of occurrence in populations to shed light on causes.

Three areas of investigation in childhood leukaemia remain of particular interest, partly because sufficient earlier work has suggested that they are promising lines of enquiry (though doubt remains) and partly because they are feasible hypotheses for us to test.

These areas are the role, if any, of electric and magnetic fields, of being born big (higher birth weight) and of contact with infection by the foetus or child.”

As a major part of their programme the team will be carrying out further investigations to clarify some of the findings of the Draper Report, their study into the association between proximity to power lines and childhood leukaemia risk which was published in 2005.

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