Solving one of cancer's biggest puzzles

Wigan Today

Wigan grandad Peter Hurst was given just six to nine months to live after being diagnosed with cancer. But he is going strong three years later and is supporting a fund-raising appeal by The Christie for research to help other cancer patients.

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00:00 He told me they got small cell cancer which is one of the worst ones.

00:08 It was like somebody hitting me in the chest with a mallet. He said he'd got 69

00:17 months to live. It was devastating. Devastating for my family as well.

00:25 They were very upset. It was about six or nine months into my treatment. I went

00:35 for a scan and they told me that it really hadn't, it was still going, it

00:43 wasn't receding. Well apart from the anxiety side of things and never far

00:52 from your mind what might be going on. It's fearsome really, not knowing.

01:02 Drug resistance is actually a really common problem across many tumour types.

01:11 So patients may respond very well initially to their cancer treatment and

01:16 that might be chemotherapy or one of the new targeted therapies.

01:19 Unfortunately what often happens in some cases the tumour comes back. The type of

01:24 lung cancer that I work on and I focus on it's almost every patient that will

01:29 become resistant to their therapy. This is an extraordinary time for a cancer

01:34 research portfolio and ambitions in Manchester. We have an extraordinary new

01:38 building that's going up and opening soon that will house both researchers

01:43 and clinicians together. Everything comes about by research, nothing ever moves

01:52 forward without research. So it's really really important. Other diseases have

01:59 been eradicated in the past so hopefully you know cancer will at some point.

02:09 Having the best PhD students as part of our program is critical to generating

02:14 those ideas and actually carrying them through to really elegant research

02:18 that'll be world-renowned and impactful for our patients. So what my lab is known

02:24 for is our work on circulating tumour cells. So we can collect these

02:27 circulating cells in the bloodstream of the patient before they have their

02:31 chemotherapy and we can make a model to study in the lab. So the student has an

02:35 amazing opportunity to study that drug resistance.

02:40 I would say that if you can give anything to help with this research it's

02:50 really really something that helps people like me. I don't know what I would

02:56 have done without the research that's gone on. Thank you very much.

03:02 you

03:05 you

03:07 [Music]

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