Why is cancer research important?
Each step of cancer research is critical for a specific reason:
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How does basic science research help patients?
- It's very obvious how pre-clinical, clinical, and patient-based research benefit patients. But it is not always obvious how basic science research does so.
- Basic science research underlies all other phases of cancer research. This is where most new ideas are generated and where new hypotheses are tested that lay the foundation for later drug discoveries.
- The aim of basic science research is to understand the enemy. This means investigating how the molecules that misbehave in cancer cells confer the properties that allow the cells to form dangerous tumours.
- Knowing how a cancer cell works allows us to find its vulnerabilities and exploit these to treat the tumours.
- Every process we identify that misbehaves in a cancer cell represents a potential new target that we can develop a drug against.
- The more molecules and processes that we understand misbehave in cancer cells, the more potential new cancer treatments we can develop.
Why does basic science research take so long?
- We've all heard it before. The latest drug discovery in the news will take 5 - 10 years before it will be available to patients.
- Even though it takes a very long time to go from basic science research to the release of a new patient treatment, it is an essential step in the process of drug discovery because it is the only way to develop new drugs that kill cancer cells.
- It's just as frustrating for researchers that our work takes so long to help the people who need it.
- But there are some good reasons that our work takes time:
- Many different processes can go wrong in a cancer cell but not all of these make good drug targets. Figuring out the best experiments to test this, planning the experiments and then interpreting the results is time consuming. Even when the results look great, we still need to confirm that they are real and that they apply to patients and not just our models. This careful process is very long, but it is the best way to ensure that our work eventually leads to positive outcomes for patients.
- We study cancers using a variety of model systems that each replicates specific features of a human tumour. But each of these models has limits and none fully replicates the disease process in patients. We deal with this by testing our hypotheses in several different model systems to show that we see a similar result, which increases the likelihood that our observations will hold true in real patients.
- Each cancer is unique even though it shares some key features with other similar tumours. Researchers are trying to find ways of treating as many people as possible and so we need to study as many patient samples as we can get in order to identify what they share and focus our energy on these common properties.
- Cancers contain a mix of different cell types that interact together to allow a tumour to grow. This means that we can't just study one type of cell but have to look at how multiple cell types cooperate in order to understand cancer's biology and find ways to stop its growth.
- Cancers are moving targets because they continuously adapt and change to survive in their environment. This means that we have to test how a tumour changes over time when we try to treat it. In the same way that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics, cancer cells can become resistant to drugs we expose them to and can become more aggressive in the process. Our research needs to account for how the cancers change over time as we try to treat them.
- Tumours grow inside of patients and so we need to test how potential treatments that kill cancer cells will affect the healthy cells around the tumour. We have found many compounds that kill cancer cells, but these also kill healthy cells and would thus cause a lot of harm to patients. We always need to compare how cancer cells differ from healthy cells and identify potential treatments that only kill the cancers. This is particularly hard because cancers evolve from our own cells and look very similar to the healthy cells in the body. This makes treating cancers a lot harder than treating infections because the bacteria and viruses that cause infections look very different from our own cells and can be easily targeted by drugs that have little effect on our own cells.
- Because basic science research is based on understanding the complicated nature of biology, we come up with many ideas to explain our observations that end up being false in the end. While this gives us valuable information about what is NOT happening in a cancer cell, it is not very glamorous or newsworthy. This means that there are long periods of time when you don't hear on the news about the hard work we do every day.
- Basic science research needs to have very high standards, which means that we need to provide a lot of evidence to convince our peers that our ideas are really true. It takes a lot of time to acquire all of this evidence BUT these high standards mean that only the most promising therapies make it to the next stage of cancer research and are tested in people. This minimizes the number of times a drug enters clinical trials and is found to be either harmful to patients or to not be effective in treating cancer. This saves a lot of money in the end and also minimizes the number of people who have to be exposed to potentially dangerous substances in the search for new treatments.
2017 statistics on cancer in Canada
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