All about the science of disease
Last week some truly exciting work on new therapies for breast cancer patients was published in Science Translational Medicine. These results show how it might be possible in the near future to target immune checkpoints in breast cancer – a malignancy previously thought to be resistant to this type of therapy. An immune checkpoint is a rather … Read more
We are undoubtedly in the middle of what has been described as a “cancer epidemic”. The risk of contracting cancer has risen by over 10% over a single generation and is expected to increase by over 20% between 2010 and 2020. This means that in three years’ time there will be about 2 million people diagnosed with cancer … Read more
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer known to modern medicine. The chances of a pancreatic cancer patient to survive for five years after being diagnosed with the disease is only 7%. As a term of comparison, a breast cancer patient has around 85% chance of surviving for over 5 years from … Read more
As a cancer scientist and someone interested in the ever-evolving relationship between science and the media, my eye was caught this week by the flashy headlines claiming that good-old tomatoes might just be the cure for gastric cancer. All the media fuss appears to stem from a paper accepted last week in the Journal Of … Read more
Days are getting longer, nights are getting shorter. Temperatures are rising, and so is the heat. Summer is coming. With summer come higher levels of UV radiation – which translate to a higher risk of cutaneous melanoma. Melanoma is a cancer of the skin and one of the most aggressive forms of cancer. If it is … Read more
Everyone remembers the iconic moment in 2013 when Angelina Jolie underwent a double mastectomy to protect herself from cancer. Jolie had undergone genetic testing, which had revealed that she carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene that dramatically increased her risk of contracting breast cancer. Jolie’s genetic testing results meant she had an 87% chance … Read more