Getting to grips with hard-to-treat cancers
Survival is improving all the time – but there is still a long way to go...
THE good news is that, thanks to research and new treatments, more people are surviving cancer.
Over the past 40 years survival has doubled and today one in two patients survive cancer for at least 10 years.
For a number of cancers, the improvement in survival is even more pronounced. Today almost all men with testicular cancer survive the disease for 10 years or more. That’s partly thanks to cisplatin, a drug Cancer Research UK helped develop.
But the situation is not equal across all cancer types. Survival remains devastatingly low for some cancers, such as brain, oesophageal, lung and pancreatic cancer. Just 19% of people with malignant brain tumours will survive their cancer for five years or more.
More research is needed into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat these hard-to-treat cancers to help more people survive their disease.
To tackle this, Cancer Research UK has invested £85million in these forms of cancer over the past year on a wide range of projects all over the UK.
Brain tumours are particularly hardto-treat because the brain’s protective barrier makes it difficult for certain drugs to get to the tumour.
One of the areas of research into tackling brain cancer is Dr Harry Bulstrode’s work with his team from the University of Cambridge.
They are investigating whether the Zika virus could be used to help treat an aggressive type called glioblastoma because of the virus’s unique ability to cross the blood-brain barrier.
If they can learn lessons from Zika’s ability to get into the brain and see if it can target particular fast-growing cancer cells within a brain tumour – called stem cells – they could be
Cancer Research UK has invested £85m in ‘hard-to-treat’ cancers over the past year
holding the key to future treatments.
Bringing new treatments to patients is key to helping more people to survive, and clinical trials are an important step in their development. Many clinical trials are now becoming more tailored, such as the Cancer Research UK-supported Precision-Panc study, which aims to develop personalised treatments for patients with pancreatic cancer.
The trial could reveal essential information that can be used to reshape how treatment for pancreatic cancer is developed by looking at individual patients’ cancers and offering a “menu” of treatments. New technologies are also emerging to help doctors tackle the disease.
Professor Zoltan Takats in London is testing whether an “intelligent knife”, known as the iKnife, can tell the difference between normal and cancerous cells during breast cancer surgery. This could help surgeons remove much more of the tumour more accurately than current surgical techniques allow, hopefully preventing the disease from coming back.
But there is still a long way to go for hard-to-treat cancers and Cancer Research UK needs support to continue their life-saving work. We’ve teamed up with the charity to celebrate the progress that research is making in helping more people survive their disease and to show how their cutting edge work will help bring more good news to more people.