Question: When do you think there will be a medicine to cure blood cancer?

Lizzie Wright answered on 8 Mar 2018:

Hi Bruno, there are already some treatments that have shown a high cure rate in blood cancers. The problem is, there are lots of different blood cancers and each person’s cancer cells can act differently.

One really exciting recent development is called CAR-T therapy. This just got approved for use in America and has shown high cure rates in a certain type of leukaemia. In this treatment, the patients white blood cells are removed and they are treated so that they will seek out cancer cells in the blood and attack them. The modified cells are then infused back into the patient. It means the treatment is specifically tailored to each patient and is very cool stuff.

Theres lots of exciting research going on for all types of blood cancers, so hopefully we can improve the survival rate of these in the coming years.