• Question: Have there been any recent breakthroughs regarding cancer?

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      Asked by VFLinden to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 10 Jun 2016.
      • Photo: Jonathan Hunter

        Jonathan Hunter answered on 10 Jun 2016:

        There are constant breakthroughs in cancer research. I tend to keep an eye on New Scientist/BBC news for the really big ones. Things like gene editing, AI drug design, new drug delivery systems, phototherapy drugs. There is a huge amount of info online about it. As it’s not my field, I don’t know which are the most impressive or have the most potential but they are all very interesting.

      • Photo: Lindsay Robinson

        Lindsay Robinson answered on 11 Jun 2016:

        There are always little breakthroughs being made in cancer treatment. Sometimes you’ll see them on the news and sometimes you hear about it in scientific journals. There’s a lot of work at the moment to tailor cancer treatment to each patient and that should make treatment better. It should mean fewer nasty side effects which are unfortunately coo on in cancer treatment.

      • Photo: Danna Gifford

        Danna Gifford answered on 11 Jun 2016:

        In my opinion, one of the biggest breakthroughs in biology research, which will hopefully be applied to cancer research, is gene editing through a process called “CRISPR”. CRISPR is a kind of gene editing tool that was discovered first in bacteria. The hope is that CRISPR can be used to fix the genes that cause cancer.

      • Photo: Juan Ortiz

        Juan Ortiz answered on 11 Jun 2016:

        Difficult question!! Let me think

      • Photo: Daniela Lobo

        Daniela Lobo answered on 16 Jun 2016:

        Because of the number of people working on this field, breakthroughs are frequent. The latest one I heard about was on brain cancer – the development of a new technique that allowed chemotherapy (cancer treatment that uses chemicals/drugs to destroys cancer) to be given directly on the brain tumour.

        I would suggest the same as Jonny, because that’s also what I do when I want to learn about something I don’t know much about – online and paper magazines: New Scientist, BBC Focus, Guru Magazine, Laboratory News; blogs and websites: Mosaic (from Wellcome Trust), Nature.com, Smithsonian.com, scienceseeker.org (a collection of articles from science magazines).

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