To mark World Cancer Day, Professor Miriam Dwek, Professor of Cancer Biology, was a guest on the Different Conversations podcast to talk about the current science around cancer research and how she has contributed to understandings that might lead to new treatments.
During the podcast, Professor Dwek and Dr Bradley Elliott, Senior Lecturer in Physiology, spoke about a range of topics including whether there will ever be a cure for cancer, breast cancer survival rates and how this has changed and Professor Dwek’s contribution to understanding cancer that may lead to new treatments of cancers.
Talking about the possibility of ending up in a post-cancer world, Professor Dwek said: “I think that we will certainly move much further towards prevention, so it is quite well-recognised and acknowledged that possibly at least 30-40% of cancers could be preventable…we know that from work that has been done elsewhere…and from all sorts of modelling. In terms of the cancers that are diagnosed, what we are seeing in Western and high economically-affluent countries is that there is a move towards earlier diagnosis.
“That’s not the case for all cancers, but for many of the cancers now, and the earlier that you diagnose a disease, the greater the chance that surgical incision and other treatments will start to work better and so we have seen these increases in survival rates.
“In summary I would say we’re probably not going to cure it, but I think as the decades move on we will certainly see fewer cancers because they will be more preventable, and I think the ones that we do see will hopefully be more treatable, which is what the trend has been over the decades.”
Professor Dwek also spoke about her own contributions to research and the development of new treatments. She said: “One of the main areas that I have worked on is this idea of trying to better target cancers with treatment. The cancer cell, like all cells in our body ,has a protective coating over it, and my area has been studying the sugars that are within that protective coating, it is an area called glycobiology.
“Now, I am working with one company looking at drugs that will prevent that sugar coating that’s on top of those cells. A big step for our lab was discovering that we can essentially feed cancer cells certain drugs to stop these sugars and make them more leaky and then make the chemotherapeutics work better in them so I feel that that was a really big step change when we published that paper.”
She also spoke about how she was the Principal Investigator of the largest study of diet and lifestyle in breast cancer patients in the UK, where they recruited a cohort of patients from 55 hospitals across the country who provided information about their own personal diet and lifestyle behaviour. Alongside Dr Claire Robertson, Senior Lecturer on the Global Public Health Nutrition MSc course, they have catalogued this information and started to look at survival rates in the patients. Professor Dwek said: “That combination of doing the laboratory work but also looking at the patients is really great, it’s great to be able to do both.”
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