Over the last year, the news has been dominated by the big news – the coronavirus pandemic. It would be easy to think that this is the only risk to health at the moment. But sadly, cancer is also still one of the biggest killers worldwide.
Cancer has often seemed a mysterious and the name of the illness alone instils fear. It is only recently that we have been finding out more about it- up until the 1950s there was not a lot of knowledge amongst scientists and doctors about how cancer started or how it behaved once it had taken hold in the body.
Many research projects have been carried out since then, and trials for better ways to treat cancer, such as adaptive phase 1 studies by companies like Richmond Pharmacology are allowing doctors to be able to diagnose cancers early, warn about prevention and come up with better treatments for the disease.
This means that many cancers that would not have been survived as recently as 20 years ago can now be successfully treated and cured. In particular survival rates of prostate cancer and breast cancer are continuing to improve.
There is however still a lot of work to be done. Charities like Cancer Research UK play a big part in supporting those suffering from cancer as well as helping to further explore possible treatments and cures for what still is an extremely deadly and unpleasant illness.