• Question: how close have you come to curing cancer?

    Asked by hatpie to Adam on 19 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by fawazaandmegan12.
    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 19 Nov 2012:

      not close I am afraid. I believe a cure for cancer is going to be achieved by using lots of different drugs together. And what drugs work in one person will not work in all people, or on all types of cancer. So many different cures will be needed.

      I am currently investigating whether the WWOX protein is able to make one of our anti-cancer drugs work better. This is a discovery made by my PhD student a couple of years ago. It seems that in a cancer where the WWOX gene is damaged, the drugs we are using may not work as well as they do in a cancer where WWOX is still made. I hope that we can work out exactly what WWOX is doing here, and then develop a treatment that will replace WWOX in cancers that do not have it. This might improve the treatment of ovarian cancer and possibly some other cancer types that are treated with the same anti-cancer drug. I certainly have my fingers crossed.

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