• Question: i really would like to know Can we reduce different cancers to a set of common traits so that they can be noticed and treated faster?!

    Asked by Amy on 21 Jun 2023.
    • Photo: Annabel Black

      Annabel Black answered on 21 Jun 2023:

      This is a great question! One of the main reasons that cancer is so difficult to treat is that the same cancer can be very different in different patients – therefore one drug treatment that works for one patient might not work for someone else. We have ways of looking closer at different kinds of cancers now to work out lots and lots of specific mutations in the cancer cell DNA and comparing this across lots of different people to work out similarities in how these mutations might be making the cancer grow and why the drug treatments might not be working. Doing this means we can make drugs to target very specific mutations and tailor these for patients who don’t respond to ‘first line’ medicines (the drugs that doctors give to almost everyone) like chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

    • Photo: Zahra Rattray

      Zahra Rattray answered on 23 Jun 2023:

      That is a great comment and question- there is a field called precision medicine, which is dedicated to looking at this at different levels from mutations in genes, right through to proteins and small molecules. It seeks to look for common fingerprints and patterns across the population, with the goal of delivering more precise and targeted care for patients.

    • Photo: Kathleen Duffin

      Kathleen Duffin answered on 3 Jul 2023:

      This is a really good question. Earlier diagnosis can make a big difference to cancer treatment, and I think there has been a lot of work done by public health teams to try to teach people about what to look out for in terms of signs and symptoms of cancer. But unfortunately, there are many different types of cancer, and even the same cancer can present very differently in two different people. So I think rather than common traits which a person can see/feel/show, it is more likely that we will be able to identify changes in DNA/genes/proteins that are associated with cancer cells.

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