Question: If you were to study the life of a person with caner would you??

Georgia Campbell answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hi,

that’s a really good question – I don’t think I would for a patient with cancer, but maybe for someonewith another disease.

The thing is, we know lots about how cancer progresses in people with the disease, so I don’t think we’d learn a lot from following one patient now. What we have to do for cancer now is work at a smaller (cellular, and even molecular!) level, and find ways to treat all of the things that we already know cause cancer to progress. It would be really sad to follow a patient with something like cancer too, as we can’t yet be sure that we’d be able to get them better 🙁

This would be aninteresting thing to do for diseases that we don’t know a lot about yet though – finding out how a disease progresses in a patient is a really good way to find out which cells are most likely to be affected and what could be going wrong in them, so its a great way to find a starting point into research for a cure!

Thanksfor your question 🙂