Question: How are you planning to help cancer in the future?

Alex Haragan answered on 2 Jun 2018:

Well I’m hoping to hurt cancer not help it! But I understanding your question.

My research focuses around being able to understand why only some people respond to certain types of cancer treatment.

If you imagine I have 3 different drugs – lets call them drug A, B and C.

If we imagine a person with cancer – how do we know which drug is best for them?

The answer is often we don’t until we give it to them. So maybe we pick drug A, it doesn’t work so we try Drug B, and maybe it works OK but Drug C works best and it might take some time to work that out.

In so doing – we have given drugs that: 1- haven’t helped 2- cause side effects 3- are expensive 4- stops the person from getting the right drug in the first place (and wastes precious time)

My research is looking at how we can tell which drug, A, B or C (or more) is the best one for the patient, so we can avoid all the downsides.
The other part of my research is to say – well why does Drug C work best? and why does Drug A not work?
This is important because its helps to answer the most important question:

If all three drugs aren’t going to work well – how do we develop a new drug, Drug D, that will work?

Its a big challenge but very exciting!