The tale of Prof Sarah Blagden’s attempt to find a treatment that stops the disease is the rarest of things – TV that makes you dare to hope
C
ancer Detectives: Finding the Cures should come with a rare warning: may make you feel hopeful for humanity and marginally less convinced that we are all willingly leaping into a handcart and smoothing our own paths to hell.
This is an hour that outlines the work being done to create vaccines against cancers. Lung cancer, specifically, at the moment – 50,000 cases of which are diagnosed each year in the UK and which is the most common cause of cancer-related death – but with the potential to prevent many more types in the future.
That such a fantastic possibility is moving out of the realms of the fantastical is because of the progress that has been made understanding the body’s immune system and the work it does zapping (medical term) so many cells, probably on a daily basis, when they first start sending out signals that all is not well within their own bodies, and preventing them from multiplying. Until and unless, of course, the day comes when the signals are muted or missed and cancer results. Survival rates for the disease have doubled in the last 50 years, but diagnoses themselves are on the rise, so the race to defeat it continues without cease.
