Rachel Brazil

The association between cancer treatments and dramatic side effects such as uncontrolled nausea and vomiting retains a powerful hold over public perceptions and parts of the media. Recent decades have seen a big improvement in many of these, partly due…

Gene therapy to treat cancer has been on the research agenda for three decades, with the first examples having been developed in the 1990s, according to Hrvoje Miletic, Senior Consultant in Neuropathology at the Bergen/Haukeland University Hospital in Norway. “But…

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…

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the second most common cause of death in people with cancer, yet it has received far less attention than other possible complications, such as infection or neutropenic sepsis. This situation is beginning to change, with events…

The first machine learning application in healthcare was approved by the FDA as recently as 2019 to analyse MRI images of the heart. In oncology, applications that make use of artificial intelligence (AI) are appearing thick and fast, from improving…

According to Francesco Pignatti, Head of Oncology at the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the term ‘tumour agnostic’ is a misnomer. The definition of agnostic in ancient greek, he argues, is ‘lacking in knowledge’. But with these new approaches, it’s not…