• Question: Can you know the time that white blood cells convert into cancer?

    Asked by Diegoperezsanz to Sian, Max, Lizzie, Francis, Ben on 6 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      WOAH, cool question. It’s difficult to know this but it would be cool if we could, because then we could trace the origins of cancer and be better at treating and understanding it. We can look at the genes inside white blood cells to see what went wrong and made them turn into cancer cells, but sometimes this happens before a person is born.

    • Photo: Lizzie Wright

      Lizzie Wright answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Yes this is a cool question – great idea! I’m not sure we could detect the exact time, but there are lots of devices in development now which try to detect cancer cells as early as possible. These are called “liquid biopsies” and aim to detect tiny fragments of cancer cells in the blood at the very early stages of cancer – this means we will be abel to detect cancer much earlier and hopefully treat it more successfully.

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