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Asked by anon-292883 to Rosie on 4 May 2021.
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Rosie Goodburn answered on 27 Apr 2021: last edited 27 Apr 2021 11:01 am
Hi Alfie, this is a great question! I’d recommend watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ykU52K-Hw on drug development and testing – it explains everything about how we develop and test drugs before we give them to patients.
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Similar principles to drug development are true for radiation therapy. We want to minimise the harm to patients and maximise the benefits. We have lots of ideas about how we can keep improving cancer treatment with radiation. For example, if we can see the tumours better with MRI at the same time we treat them, we can make the radiation that goes healthy tissue lower and radiation to tumours higher at the same time. It’s important to say too that curing cancer is often done by combining several different treatments, like a drug, surgery and radiation therapy.
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Comments
Steve commented on :
Great answer from Rosie! Making a cure or a new medicine or drug takes a LONG time. Sometimes it can be as long as 12 years between Firstly you have to find a target for the medicine – this takes a lot of science research. Then you have to find your drug – which might be a small molecule or an antibody. This has lots of steps – starting with finding a basic chemical structure and then gradually making it better and better so it sticks only to your target and nothing else. You then have to test that the drug isn’t toxic and is safe before you even try it on small numbers of patients to make sure it works. At this point, all of your data and evidence has to be looked at by a special team of experts who decide if it’s OK for the new drug or treatment to be used more widely.