EACR 2016
Advances is early detection
Prof Paul Pharoah - University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
The session that I was at this morning was a session about early detection and prevention. It’s a rather eclectic subject and encompasses everything potentially from new technologies to basic health services research. Yoryos Lyratzopoulos gave a very nice talk explaining about how simple things like diagnostic delay are actually quite important in influencing cancer outcomes. So while there’s a lot of the EACR is about molecular biology and targeted therapies and improving our understanding of the biology of cancer and finding better drugs, actually there are some simple things that we could do to improve cancer outcomes like making sure that people with symptoms recognise symptoms that are symptoms that might be dangerous and going to see their doctor, then for those doctors to recognise those as important symptoms and to refer them on. So Dr Lyratzopoulos presented some data from the UK showing how much variation there is in patient instigated delays and doctor instigated delays and how it varies for different cancers, it varies in different ethnic groups, it varies by socioeconomic class and it varies by age. So there’s actually quite a lot that we can do, very simple in reality, in terms of the way health services are organised, to potentially improve cancer outcomes.
What do you think of the rise in targeted therapies?
My general impression is that there are so many targeted therapies now, the question comes up as how are we ever going to evaluate them all in clinical trials because every clinical trial is a major undertaking and each therapy is more and more targeted so the potential population is smaller and smaller, how are we actually going to achieve getting the information that we need in order to really answer the scientific questions that we want?
How do you see the field of genetics and bioinformatics evolving over the next ten years?
Genetics encompasses two bits of genetics – there’s the inherited or germline genetics and then there’s the genetics of the cancer cells themselves; my expertise is in germline genetics. I think we’ve come a long way in the last ten years but we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of understanding the inherited basis for cancer. We’re going to be able to implement technologies like high throughput sequencing on a large scale that’s going to be cheap with the computing infrastructure to actually analyse those data. So I expect progress to continue for some time to come.
