Question: Will your work just help breast cancer or will it help other cancers aswell?

Naomi Elster answered on 12 Nov 2012:

I’m really happy someone asked this question 🙂 My project focuses on a very specific type of breast cancer rather than looking at all cancer. There are a few reasons why this is good. Firstly, cancers behave so differently that we need to understand what makes certain types of cancer different from others in order to make treatments as safe and good as we can. There is a movement in research now towards “personalised medicine” which is where a doctor chooses every drug specifically to suit a patient, rather than using the same drug for the same disease in everyone. Personalised medicine should make drugs more effective and give them much less side effects, so it is a very promising thing. But in order to make this real, we have to keep our research specific.

But cancers can behave similiarly even if they don’t behave the same. For example, if I discover a method that breast cancer uses to avoid being killed by drugs, another scientist could look at my work and decide to do some experiments to see if lung cancer uses the same method to survive being treated. If it does, we could work together to find a way to stop both of these cancers becoming resistant to drugs. And every time you publish your work, you include a section on the experiments you designed and perfected to find what you found. Other scientists can then use the same techniques to help them in their own work. This means they can get more work done because they don’t have to spend as long designing techniques. By sharing the methods I develop, I can help not only other cancer scientists, but even biologists who work in different areas too.