• Question: How close are you to creating a cure or reliever for cancer? And what type of cancer do you work on?

    Asked by Mia to Josh, Chris, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 15 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by BIGBOYJAMOUS, bren izekial, NICKNACKPADDYWACK, tom, dave, holster2003, 514hafc29, Zinc, Lottie, jazzy, seb the kool kid klub leader, Kate and Peckasso :), caitlin, Hunny, Aisha, flower_girl2776, thatoneguy.
    • Photo: Josh Meyers

      Josh Meyers answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Over the last 50 years, scientists have made massive improvements to the quality of cancer care. If you are diagnosed with breast cancer today, the prognosis is far far better than it used to be.

      However I do not think we are that close to an actual ‘cure’. Nor do I think there will ever be one. Cancer is an umbrella term for more than 200 diseases. We may be able to cure some of them, but others are very challenging.

      For example pancreatic cancer is a major problem at the moment. Largely because there aren’t many symptoms and so it is not detected until late in the disease’s lifetime. So better screening technologies will be important for treating this one.

      Personally, I help to improve our drug designing capabilities. One of the things I like about drug design is that it is a transferable skill, so I can work on many different diseases. But that means that I don’t specialise on one cancer type.

      Here at the ICR we have many drug projects (that are all top secret!) working on many different types of cancer including breast, prostate, lung and brain cancers (and many more).

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I don’t work on cancer.

      However, some particle physicists are attempting to develop a relatively compact (fit in a large room), cheap (affordable by large hospitals) type of particle accelerator, specifically to help in the treatment of cancer. The problem with radiotherapy is that you damage the cancer cells all right, but you also irradiate the healthy cells along the whole path of the radiation through your body. For this reason, radiotherapy machines often fire lots of beams along different lines, all intersecting at the tumour, so that it gets dosed by all the beams but the rest of the body gets at most one beam’s worth. This, however, works better for some parts of the body (e.g. the head, which is reasonably spherical and accessible from most directions) than for others (e.g. the abdomen).

      If we could use protons for radiotherapy instead of high-energy X-rays, we could be a lot more selective. Protons have the neat property that they deposit nearly all their energy where they actually stop, and how far they travel before they stop depends on their energy. So, if your hospital had its own proton accelerator, it could tune the proton energy so they would deposit nearly all their energy at the right depth to hit the tumour, and very little anywhere else – without the need for multiple beams.

      This is called hadron therapy, but at the moment it is only available in a very few places because the accelerators are very large and extremely expensive – you have to bring the patient to the lab, and there are only a few labs. If we could install a small accelerator in every large hospital, a lot more patients could be treated this way.

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