Some 50,000 Australians die from cancer every year, even as we hear about big breakthroughs in treatments. What makes cancer so tough to tackle? And what, exactly, is it?
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.A crisis of confidence can come from the most unassuming sources. For Darren Saunders, it was a simple question from his young daughter. The cancer biologist had been feeling pretty optimistic about developments in the search for cancer cures, with “whole new classes of treatments coming through”.
This is where the refrain about the moon breaks down. “We know what the moon is,” says Saunders, “we know where it is, we know how far it is, what it’s made of – so it’s a fixed target. Cancer is very different in that we still don’t completely understand what it is and how it works.
When cancer spreads, it is called metastatic. Medicos call the original tumour “primary” and the secondary tumours “mets”, short for metastases. Pathologists speak of grades of cancer and stages of its development . Although it is different in each case, generally a small tumour that has not spread is described as stage one, while cancer that has spread to at least one other body organ is stage four.
“You can produce a vaccine against something like the spike protein of the coronavirus because human cells don’t have spike proteins,” says Professor Ian Olver, one of Australia’s leading cancer researchers, bioethicists and medical oncologists, “so it’ll kill the virus but won’t kill the cells around it.
Saunders calls it a perfect storm. “They are horrible little things, but this amazing, adaptive behaviour is one of the things that make them so fascinating to study.”
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