Cancer drug cisplatin was accidentally discovered to help treat cancer in 1965. And it’s been doing exactly that since it was approved for use in 1978.
Screening can save lives, which is why the NHS offers checks for breast, cervical and bowel cancers. Breast screening tries to pick up cancer at an early stage when it may be more treatable. Cervical screening…
What causes cancer? This deceptively simple question has a devilishly complex answer. So when US researchers proposed a relatively simple mathematical formula to explain a long-standing conundrum in cancer…
Fact: In 2012, there were 14 million new cancer cases worldwide, and 8.2 million cancer related deaths. Fact: About 70% of all cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Fact: The number…
In 1971 Richard Nixon declared “War on Cancer” with the signing of the National Cancer Act. Significant progress has been made in the intervening 44 years – and Europe has been at the forefront of many…
Cancer is big news; we often hear of some kind of cure for some version of the illness. But whether it’s a “natural cure” or a promising molecule on its way to becoming a new medicine, there are ways non-scientists…
Cancer screening is beneficial when it’s able to prevent people dying from cancer. And it should clearly be adopted where there’s evidence showing this. But using cancer survival rates to promote screening…
The cost of treatment is one of the biggest areas of the NHS budget and one of the most sensitive areas of discussion. We would all like to have an infinite amount of money to spend treating diseases and…
If you’re a teetotaller, your friends have likely tried to convince you to taste red wine by swearing on its multiple health benefits. These benefits have been credited to a compound found in red wine…
While the medical world is transfixed by the urgency of finding and testing new potential treatments for Ebola, the House of Lords is wrestling with how to employ treatments that have not been tested for…
Nine out of ten cancer patients die because cancer cells enter the blood circulation, spread and form tumours at distant organs. In circulation, cells can move individually or in a cluster. It is believed…
Widely proscribed around the world for its recreational uses, cannabis is being used in a number of different therapeutic ways to bring relief for severe medical conditions. Products using cannabinoids…
It’s unthinkable to give a placebo to someone to treat their cancer, but could we use one to treat chemotherapy’s well-known side effects? Unfortunately, we may never be able to answer this question because…
HIV is one of the deadliest viruses encountered by humans in recent history and will kill 1.5m people this year alone, compare this to Ebola, for example, which has killed less than 5,000 so far, and you…
Innovative new drugs to treat cancer frequently make the headlines, either due to great success or controversy, as pharmaceutical companies get lambasted for selling the drugs at too high a price for state…