Biology basic
How organoids could help match treatments to tumours
When diagnosed with cancer, few things are more important than having confidence that the treatment you are prescribed is the best possible option for you. For many cancers, particularly the more common ones, the evidence for choosing one option over…
What can we expect from mRNA cancer vaccines?
Messenger RNA vaccines turned around Europe’s fight against the Covid pandemic. Less than a year after the first lockdowns were declared, mRNA vaccines got regulatory approval for emergency use, first in people at high-risk from Covid, and later in the…
Tackling drug resistance: how our commensal bacteria can hinder or help
Response to therapeutics can differ widely from patient to patient, with some gaining highly significant survival benefits from a therapy that in others elicits no response at all. Patients who respond initially often develop resistance or relapse over time. Not…
The development of organoids for cancer research: an ode to the scientific method
Some twenty years ago, I sailed with my two little sons Sander (aged 7) and Max (aged 5) on the Ijsselmeer, formerly a large inner sea in the centre of my country. We passed by a beautiful row of newly…
Natural killers: a new tactical unit joins the cancer immunotherapy brigade
There was a time when all that oncologists treating solid tumours needed to know about leukocytes was how to measure the damage that cytotoxic drugs inflicted on their patients’ white blood cell count and their capacity to fight off infections.…
Oncolytic viruses – a new wave of therapeutic possibilities
Going back to the nineteenth century there were reports that infectious diseases seemed to provide brief periods of remission for cancer patients. One case from 1896 reported that the enlarged spleen of a woman with “myelogenous leukemia” shrank to nearly…
Malignant: Insights into the process of metastasis and how we can stop it
Why and how do cancer cells travel from their original site to seed new tumours elsewhere in the body, and what can be done to stop them? A series of presentations at the virtual June 2020 annual meeting of the…