New cancer drugs will be developed over the next five years that will extend survival rates, increase cures and decrease the unpleasant side-effects associated with current standard treatments, a major conference on cancer research heard in Cork at the weekend.
Prof Paul Workman, director of the Cancer Research UK centre for cancer therapeutics and the Institute of Cancer Research, predicted that the next five years would be "a new golden era of cancer development in drug discovery".
He said in the past cancer therapy had been dominated by cytotoxic drugs which were associated with many side-effects, including nausea and hair loss. Patients often responded well to these drugs but became resistant to them over time.
"The new drugs are based on pinpointing exactly what has gone wrong with the cancer cell at the level of the genome and comparing these abnormalities or mutations with normal cell genomes. We can then tailor-make drugs that focus on precisely pinpointing the abnormalities in the cells," Prof Workman told The Irish Times.
Prof Paul Redmond of the department of surgery at Cork University Hospital and UCC highlighted the need for the establishment of a third National Cancer Forum in Ireland to advise on the development of a specific plan for cancer research.
"Cancer is not going to go away. By the year 2020 we will see a doubling of the instance of cancer cases in this country, so we need to take this issue very seriously."
He said there were major variations of treatment between areas in Ireland. "This means that people are having different operations for the same type of cancer depending on where they live, and this translates into differences in outcome of up to 30 per cent depending on where you live.
"This is unsustainable and we can't allow it to continue. Ireland also ranks pretty poorly in terms of international outcome rates in cancer patients."
