• Question: Which cancer do you think you are closest to curing?

    Asked by anon-208414 to Gill, Tori, Titus, Stuart, Hannah, Alessandro on 6 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-208363, anon-208278.
    • Photo: Gill Harrison

      Gill Harrison answered on 6 Mar 2019: last edited 6 Mar 2019 9:25 am

      I’m afraid I’m not in the field of curing cancer, my role is in detection. We’ve got much better at detecting some cancers using imaging, so they stand a better chance of having a good outcome.
      Hopefully someone else will be able to answer this.

    • Photo: Tori Blakeman

      Tori Blakeman answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Same as Gill really – I’m not involved in cancer research at the moment. However what I would say is that STFC is working with a company called Advanced Oncotherapy, to help the company develop the next generation of proton beam therapy for cancer treatment. Proton therapy produces fewer side effects than conventional radiotherapy. It uses beams of protons to precisely target cancerous tumours while limiting damage to surrounding organs or tissue. Read more here: https://stfc.ukri.org/news-events-and-publications/whats-happening/stfcs-daresbury-laboratory-gears-up-to-test-next-generation-of-cancer-treatment/

      So hopefully developing more precise, widely available treatment will help with the curing of all cancers 🙂 I’m very proud that the company I work for is helping with this!

    • Photo: Stuart Higgins

      Stuart Higgins answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Yep same for me – I don’t work directly on trying to cure cancer. I do work with biologists who use cancer cells, but not to cure cancer – it turns out some cancer cells have a special property where they become ‘immortal’ – which just means they can keep dividing and dividing and don’t stop. Normal cells can only divide a fixed number of times before they die. Biologists like working with cancer cells because it means they can do lots of experiments with cells that all came from the same place, so their experiments are more repeatable and fair.

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