“Time and cunning” needed to develop new cancer treatment

The development of a new cancer treatment will require “time and cunning”, but could eventually be effective, a scientist has suggested.

Dr Paul Edwards, from the University of Cambridge, recently identified a gene – called Neurogulin-1 – which is damaged in more than half of the cases of breast cancer and could lead to progress in the treatment of the illness.

He said that this discovery is important because knowing how a cell becomes cancerous may provide the key to developing effective treatment, which is why Neurogulin-1 could be so important.

Dr Edwards explained: “It isn’t easy to put something back that’s broken, so it will take time and cunning to develop new treatments based on this discovery. But it might be possible in time.”

Research by Breast Cancer Care indicates that a person is diagnosed with the illness every 11 minutes in the UK, with around 46,000 new cases reported each year.