The C word

Some of Australia's most brilliant brains are unlocking the secrets of cancer to find new ways to prevent and treat a disease that affects many thousands of lives every year, and the good news is that there is hope. Here we highlight a few of the most promising developments.

- SARAH MARINOS

It's a word that many people are all too familiar with, and are often in fear of. Cancer turns lives upside down and causes immeasurable anxiety and distress - not only to the person diagnosed, but to their family and close friends.

It involves treatments that are prolonged, invasive and uncomfortable and sadly, in far too many cases, cancer robs families of cherished time with a loved one. It steals what could have been and what should have been.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that just over 150,000 people in Australia received a cancer diagnosis in 2021 and in the same year, just over 49,000 people died from cancer. That's the equivalent of around 2900 people being told they have cancer every week and 942 people a week losing their life to the disease.

In 1982, the five-year survival rate of cancer was 47 per cent. Now the chance of surviving cancer for at least five years is 70 per cent and work is being done worldwide to boost that figure.

Researchers are focused on cancer prevention and are in laboratories improving treatments and finding new, effective options that may one day bring a cure. They are also unraveling the complexities of cancer to help survivors remain disease-free.

Better chemotherapy for breast cancer

For a third of patients with triple-negative breast cancer - which is aggressive and fast-growing chemotherapy isn't effective and women go on to develop advanced cancers elsewhere.

"We're trying to understand how we can stop patients from becoming resistant to chemotherapy because chemotherapy is still currently the best treatment," explains Associate Professor Christine Chaffer, who leads the Cancer Cell Plasticity Lab at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research.