Cancer research involves many steps because it is designed to maximize patient safety

How does basic science research help patients?

  • 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 a dangerous tumor in a patient.  
  • Knowing how a cancer cell works allows us to find its vulnerabilities and exploit these to treat the tumors.
  • 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.
  • Having high standards for basic research means that most of the ideas we investigate fail and never make it in to patients. This is not very glamorous or newsworthy and is just as frustrating for researchers as it is for patients.
  • BUT these high standards mean that only the most promising therapies make it to the next stage and are tested in people. This minimizes the number of late-stage failures which saves a lot of money. More importantly, rigorous basic science prevents people from ever being exposed to the most toxic treatments that have the least chance of ever being successful.

Why does basic science research take so long?

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  • 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.
  • 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:
    1. 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.
    2. We study cancers using a variety of model systems that each replicates specific features of a human tumor. 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.
    3. Each cancer is unique even though it shares some key features with other similar tumors. 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.
    4. Cancers contain a mix of different cell types that interact together to allow a tumor 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 interrupt it.
    5. Cancers are moving targets because they continuously adapt and change to survive in their environment. That means that we have to test how a tumor 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. 
    6. Tumors grow inside of patients and so we need to test how potential treatments that kill cancer cells will affect the healthy cells around the tumor. We have found many 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 very different from our own cells and can be easily targeted by drugs that have little effect on our own cells.