A new vista in medicine is opening up, one that for cancer has already identified the major driving mutations and thus provided focal points for the development of new drugs.
For 20 years or so Dr Robin Hesketh, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University, thought about writing a book. What he had in mind was one “that explained in the most simple way everything we think we know about cancer”. But he put it off, concentrating instead on experiments aimed at finding ways of stopping tumours growing and teaching Cambridge students about cells and how they signal to themselves and to each other. Then, one wet Sunday in 2008, he sat down at home and wrote the first words of Betrayed by Nature: The War on Cancer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Everything we think we know about cancer turns out to be quite a lot. We know that one in every three or four of us will get cancer during our lifetime – but that some of types can now be treated with very high success rates. We know that cancers are abnormal growths of cells – neoplasms – and that we’ve all got them in some form. Moles are unusual clumps of cells but are – almost always – unthreatening. We know that cancers can subvert our immune system, not only leaving us vulnerable to infection, but turning it from protector to traitor, giving succour to the neoplasm that can kill us. And we know that the lethality of these growths comes mainly from their acquiring the means to move home and, in wandering around the body, find a new locale in which to settle (a process known as metastasis).
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Image: Dr Robin Hesketh with flourescent images of (normal) human cell lines grown in culture Credit: Robin Hesketh
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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