The Cancer Treatment and Research Trust is one of the charities that WOMAC has been able to help in 2005, thanks to the money raised at the annual St Valentine's Party in February.

The Trust is a world leaders research organisation in Gestational Trophoblastic Disease.  WOMAC chairman, Janet Wilkinson, visited the Trust's to hand over a cheque for £10,000 in April this year.  Professor Seckl, expressed his thanks and explained a bit more about their work;

'Gestational trophoblastic disease is a spectrum of disorders that arise in pregnancy and range from the pre-cancerous conditions of complete and partial hydaidiform mole through to the cancerous invasive mole, choriocarcinoma and placental site trophoblastic tumour. Most women have not heard of this group of pregnancy-related diseases before. However, between 1-3 per 1000 pregnancies are molar pregnancies rather than normal pregnancies.

Like a normal pregnancy, a molar pregnancy produces the pregnancy hormone hCG but instead of having a normal baby and placenta, usually there is no baby and just abnormal placental tissue. This often causes vaginal bleeding in the first few weeks or months of pregnancy leading to an ultrasound which suggests the possibility of a molar pregnancy. The molar tissue is then removed from the womb and in most women the hCG levels in blood fall to normal over a period of weeks or months indicating that the disease is dying out. To confirm that the disease is no longer active we wait a further six months and, providing the hCG remains normal, then it is safe to try and have another baby.

However, in about 16% of women with complete moles and 0.5% of women with partial moles, the disease becomes malignant. We can detect this change because the hCG either plateaus or starts rising rather than returning to and remaining normal. Nevertheless, woman often have to wait many months before they know that they have developed the cancerous form of the disease which then requires urgent lifesaving chemotherapy.

Clearly, it would be very helpful to develop a test that we could perform just after the mole was removed from the womb which could predict immediately which moles are going to die out and which are going to transform into malignancy. This would save many weeks or months of anxious waiting and enable patients who are not going to get the cancer to get on with having their families. Recent technological advances have provided potential solutions to this problem.

The money you have donated will give us the opportunity to develop a new test which could tell a woman immediately after her molar evacuation whether her disease is going to remain benign. In this event no further monitoring would be required and she could get on with her life and family plans. On the other hand, if the test showed positive for developing malignancy then there would be no waiting around and chemotherapy could be started straightaway thereby shortening the wait until attempting a further pregnancy for a wanted child.'