Emergence of cancer cures - Conquering killer disease

ARE we on the cusp of conquering cancer? If so, it would be the greatest medical breakthrough of the past 100 years.

Cancer has claimed more lives than all the world’s wars put together. Every day hundreds of thousands of people are lost to cancer, bringing untold misery to the families of those who succumb to this dreaded disease.

But in the past two days alone new approaches both to the detection and to the treatment of a variety of cancers have been unveiled by separate research teams in Italy and the United States.

In Seattle, a revolutionary therapy that trains the immune system to attack cancer has shown what scientists have described as extraordinary results in early trials involving terminally ill patients with a success rate of up to 94%.

In Milan, similar immunotherapy treatment has also achieved startling results, boosting the body’s own natural defences to fight tumours and acting like a vaccine against cancer returning after treatment.

In California, meanwhile, a simple, cheap and quick saliva test that could revolutionise diagnosis has been unveiled. It can even provide an early detection of lung cancer, a disease that is generally seen as a death sentence.

If a cure for cancer emerges from any of these projects it will not only save millions of lives but represent the Holy Grail of medical research.