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00:00I think cancer plays the role of a bogeyman in society it has evolved with
00:14us it is part of us and it kills without prejudice we can't continue to
00:22catch cancer at the last throes of its existence when it is killing people
00:30wouldn't it be amazing to actually go one step further and stop cancer from starting at all
00:39research is where hope starts
00:43it's optimism and it's a belief that we can know what is currently unknowable and that's the challenge
00:53ultimately it could change the world
00:55for generations a cancer diagnosis left almost no hope it's a terrifying disease that has stalked us
01:05for millennia i didn't expect i had cancer because all the tests were coming back negative i don't
01:11think my body can take anymore science has fought hard against it and now the tide is finally turning
01:18one of our key goals is to transform this idea of cancer as a death sentence
01:25a group of trailblazing scientists are making new breakthroughs
01:30we now need to take those discoveries and make them work for patients
01:35this is the world's first lung cancer prevention vaccine
01:40discovering cures and finding ways to stop cancer
01:43before it even starts the tumor seems to be shrinking shocked no about the streams i would
01:49expect a man creating a future where cancer doesn't win we're getting very close to defeating cancer
01:58once and for all what's not curable today could be curable tomorrow
02:13so
02:32hello trevor yeah good morning
02:36all the time then you can yes i if you can find a vein
02:41we'll see how we get on today i think we'll go for our favorite thing is it yeah right
02:47saturday she got in there fine did she now yes
02:5268 year old trevor is at the churchill hospital in oxford being treated for skin cancer
02:59i have melanoma
03:02so i had a water my head my wife had been nagging me for at least a year to go and see and i didn't
03:14so i should have because i might not have been in the stage where i am now but you know this is life
03:21that's all right first time as well keep up that track record day
03:35i had that cut out in south abdon hospital and then they found i had secondaries
03:42disease in my liver and that way could have a year to live
03:52so i'll take your place down to the lab hopefully you'll get result within an hour hour and a half
03:57yeah all right
04:02and then hopefully we'll get going with your treatments you know lovely thank you very much
04:16hi dad all right yeah come in i'm all right do you want a hot drink at all no i'll just have a water
04:22thank you thank you he's a typical navy man very firm strict didn't want to go and get any help
04:29but eventually did oh clouds gone in again i think coming from that background becoming a patient
04:37is quite vulnerable
04:40how is your start at healing now well it's better than what it was isn't it yeah a lot better when i
04:46went in for the surgery when the procedure come in and he sort of goes yeah we got we we're going to
04:52cut something about that out what do you mean that i was told through that
05:00ultimately we all know that life starts being born and it ends with death and we've all got to go
05:05through them all but almost felt too early i felt angry i felt upset i didn't want to let him know that
05:15i was worried um it's almost like you go into protective mode of your whole family our siblings
05:22looking out for each other the grandchildren what they were going to miss out on what we were going
05:26to miss out on them hard conversations moving forward that we were going to have to have
05:32i suppose life's up to go on hold a little bit for you dad well if i'd gone when janice told me in
05:37the first place i might not have got this far so yes i can to blame myself but i didn't listen janice and
05:44i should have probably gone a year earlier but yeah maybe it's a man thing isn't it yeah i was
05:50going to say it's typical sometimes i don't know but but yeah it is so yeah it's a journey in itself
05:58every little clip of the way of the journey is a roller coaster of emotions
06:02in oxford trevor is under the care of professor sarah blagden good morning yeah morning hi trevor
06:19how are you getting on yeah good thank you very much i thought it'd be quite useful to show you
06:24the images um of your of your cancer cells okay i've got them up here on the monitor do you want
06:30to have a look as you know your cancer started in your head and one of the things that they reported
06:37at the beginning was that they found about four spots on your liver cancer is basically our own cells
06:45going rogue changes to your cells can cause uncontrolled cell division the mass of these rapidly growing
06:57cells competes with our normal cells and becomes a tumor the tumor learns to evade our immune system
07:05and over time the tumor then blocks blood vessels it blocks airways spreads to other organs in our body
07:14and damages them as well and if untreated it can drain our body's resources until ultimately we die of the disease
07:26with previous treatments having failed trevor's only hope was to join sarah's immunotherapy trial
07:34our bodies have quite a lot of clever defenses against cancer our immune systems are constantly
07:40watching so a lot of the work we're doing at the moment is to try and really understand it so that
07:46it's better able to recognize cancer the therapy trains trevor's immune system to identify and attack
07:54cancer cells so here is the liver you can see that these black dots look abnormal it's a treatment that
08:02doesn't work for everybody trevor's progress is gauged by routine scans of his tumors
08:11the ones that are quite regular like that one to me that looks like a cyst so that's nothing to
08:16worry about but the ones with the sort of irregular edges like that one look more like the cancer
08:22deposits and that's exactly what was reported they were growing before you started the study
08:27they were you know at least two and a half centimeters and now they're kind of just static
08:32and the question is are there any active tumor cells in those deposits
08:38so what we would like to do now is arrange a pat scan and use that scan to measure the amount of
08:43activity going on in those liver deposits to see whether there's any active cancer there
08:48i'm sensible enough to think that the chances of it going away completely i think are slim
08:57but you know you live in hope well i mean for the best result that's right i mean with the immunotherapy
09:02studies they've done so far about half of the people respond well and 20 years later many of them
09:09still haven't got disease back yeah so it could be that you will have a long remission and one day one
09:15of us will might say the word cure remission would just be nice yes yeah but yes let's go back to
09:24reality yeah well yeah yeah but well we'll see we'll see who knows
09:35before immunotherapy we didn't really understand the full power that the immune system has against cancer
09:43but this has completely transformed it for us because it's enabled us now to realize that
09:47we might be able to harness that very very powerful immune response at a cancer before
09:53it starts rather than waiting until it has started
10:03by 2040 the number of new cancer cases each year in the uk is expected to rise to over half a million
10:10uh
10:19on the ward where sarah works 150 people regularly come to take part in the clinical trials
10:26i'm a clinician scientist which means that i'm half a practicing doctor an oncologist who looks
10:32after cancer patients and the other half I'm a scientist so I do research on cancer.
10:40Oncology, you're dealing with the day-to-day reality of cancer and all its frustrations.
10:47When you know what cancer does, when you know how long it takes, sometimes decades,
10:53to develop in our bodies, when you know those various steps it goes through before it becomes
10:59cancer and that there is such a long window that we are currently not intervening. It feels to me
11:06morally wrong not to go and explore that further and actually do something to stop it much earlier.
11:18I would feel very dissatisfied if I wasn't doing this right now because I really feel like I want to
11:23make some small amount of difference. I have a big idea
11:31which is building on our knowledge from immunotherapy to really design a series of vaccines against
11:38specific cancers but then to pull them all into a single vaccine that you would give to everyone
11:45to protect them from cancer. I will demonstrate with fruit. Okay imagine that this is a normal cell
11:54okay and normal cells communicate with our immune system via a flag system and basically these are
12:01just a string of proteins or amino acids and the immune cell comes past sees it and it says everything's
12:08fine and it carries on. When the normal cell is unwell or anything abnormal happens in the cell it then
12:15changes the signal and signals something abnormal and the immune cells come past and they just basically
12:20recognize okay this isn't right. It binds to the cell and it destroys that abnormal cell and this is a
12:27really important way that our cells remain healthy in our bodies. What we know about cancer cells is that they
12:33also have very abnormal signals but unfortunately we're not very good at eradicating cancers from our
12:41bodies. Effectively what happens is the cancer cell evades the immune system with a kind of cloak of
12:46invisibility so that means that although they are flagging some abnormal proteins on the cell surface the
12:53immune cells can't recognize this and this enables the the cell to grow and grow and become a really nasty
13:00established invasive cancer. Somewhere in the trajectory between a normal cell becoming a cancerous
13:07cell it goes through a pre-cancer stage and we know now that that takes about 10 years.
13:15I liken it to a sort of cocoon and moth you know the cocoon stage is the pre-cancer stage and it's a stage
13:23that can take about a decade before the moth or the cancer actually occurs. So it's perfectly possible
13:31that you or I have a cancer already developing in our bodies that will not be diagnosed probably for
13:38another decade. And during that stage again the cell is signaling to the immune system that it's not well
13:47that it's not right. But it hasn't acquired this cloak of invisibility. And most times our immune
13:54cells are very good at eradicating, recognizing this is abnormal and eradicating these pre-cancers.
14:00And this is probably what happens in our bodies all the time so we're probably constantly eradicating
14:04pre-cancer. But some of these cells are breaking through and they are escaping the immune system
14:10and that's probably how cancers start in the first place. So what we're doing with the vaccines is
14:17we're basically teaching the immune system to better recognize those early changes here to prevent this
14:25from then becoming a cancer. We have this sort of ticking time bomb within us. I feel a real sense of
14:35urgency because I think that we have a once in a generation opportunity to bring together
14:40the technologies and the research that's being conducted. This is an opportunity that can't wait.
14:47The opportunity is now.
14:56Hello Julie. Hi, my name is Professor Blagdon.
15:12In Oxford, oncologist Sarah Blagdon is on a mission to create a vaccine against cancer that is the first
15:18of its kind in the world. You're having your transfusion today.
15:23Yes, I am. How are you feeling? You must be exhausted.
15:25I am very exhausted. Yeah.
15:27Going to bed in the afternoons for sleep.
15:30What we call cancer is at the end of a very long disease process that's taken place in our bodies
15:36and at this point in time that process is too often being allowed to happen without any intervention
15:43whatsoever. Sarah leads a research group at the University of Oxford to develop the vaccine.
15:54In the last 50 years, research has helped double cancer survival, but it's not all good news.
16:01We know that the incidence of cancer is growing year on year. Cancer is on the rise and we need to do
16:07something about it soon. Our destination is ultimately to protect everyone against cancer.
16:19But you have to start somewhere. And lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the UK.
16:27There are almost 50,000 cases of lung cancer diagnosed every year.
16:31With the lung cancer vaccine, we have taken and modified a virus and loaded it with genetic
16:40instructions. And these instructions are teaching our immune cells to recognize early changes that
16:47happen in the lungs as they transition towards cancer. So what we're doing is we are teaching your immune
16:55cells. We're priming them to recognize and destroy pre-cancerous cells as soon as they start to develop.
17:04And these cells are then able to pass that knowledge around to more and more immune cells,
17:11which can then patrol the lung and other tissues for any cells that are starting to transition towards cancer.
17:18Zenaida is a post-doctoral researcher leading the pre-clinical lab testing of the vaccine.
17:29My job is to test that we can actually train immune system to see and attack cancer cells.
17:38So we need to show that the vaccine can do a job so we can take it into a clinical trial.
17:42When I first came up with this idea, I felt too embarrassed to say it in public because it just
17:51seemed ludicrously optimistic. But actually we're starting to think maybe it isn't such a mad idea.
18:01I often walk to get, you know, a drink or food and then you see patients who have exhausted all of
18:07their treatment options. Of course, you want to do something that is going to help them have better
18:13quality of life. So from that point of view, it keeps you going, but there is also that stress.
18:18How fast can I get there?
18:21Zenaida will present the results to Sarah when the tests are complete.
18:28It's really important to show that the vaccine works in cells before we take it into people.
18:34If it can't, then we've designed it wrong.
18:48Just coming.
18:51Hello, darling. Hello. Hi.
18:53How was the journey?
18:54Very good. I wanted to be a doctor since I was about six.
18:58So I want to see this trunk. Oh, yes. Right.
19:01I mean, I did have a phase of wanting to be a ballet dancer.
19:05Okay. Oh, my God. It's massive. I think I was a little bit too physically lazy for that.
19:11That's the lead line. I remember at one point I had an insect hospital and I had little beds for
19:16injured insects. Wow. It's like a treasure trove. Yes.
19:21I don't know. I suppose I probably wanted to heal them.
19:27Hey, look at this. Dad's medal. Right.
19:30Do you want to keep that, Mum? I think I was quite serious, actually, as a kid. We were an army
19:37family and we moved around a lot and we would be expected to kind of behave and turn up at things
19:43and, you know, curry lunches and parades and all that sort of stuff that army brats have to do.
19:49What is this? That's a landmine.
19:52Obviously, it's not live. No.
19:54No. My father cleared minefields out in war-torn places around the world.
20:02Oh, there's Dad.
20:03Yeah.
20:03I think his frustration was its impact on civilians. You know, people who had no intention of getting
20:10drawn into a war and ten years later might be walking a field and then suddenly a landmine going off.
20:23Do you remember when I was doing my pathology exam and I was totally stressed and Daddy was working
20:27for the UN at that point and he was about to go and clear some mines. I rang him and said,
20:32I'm really terrified. I've got this exam. I've decided I'm not going to sit it. I'm going to back
20:35out because I can't do it. I'm too stressed. And Dad said, Sarah, one of us is going to do an exam
20:42tomorrow and one of us is going to a minefield. Which one would you prefer to be?
20:50He genuinely wanted the world to be a better place.
20:55He was a problem solver.
20:56And I do think about him quite a lot because my work now is sort of similar.
21:05The pre-cancer within us is a bit like that unexploded mine.
21:10It's a funny parallel really. I think for both it is about prevention.
21:26The day is really odd. I don't like the sun anyway, but I think you're possibly a bit conscious
21:34of me because of my cancer. But yeah, if it's really bright sunshine, I do put a baseball hat on
21:42or something. Whether it's, you know, closing the door after the horse has bolted, I don't know.
21:49Trevor is coming to the Churchill Hospital for a scan that will show how active the cancer cells
21:54are in his tumours after two years of immunotherapy.
21:59There's a bit of curiosity. I think the main thing is where the treatment goes from this point forward.
22:09We would love to go to Australia and New Zealand because my wife has relatives out there and her
22:17brothers in New Zealand. And we was sort of in the process of sorting that out when I got my cancer
22:24diagnosed. So it's all gone on the back burner. But I don't see the point of thinking too far ahead.
22:31I fully expect there to still be activity there because cancer is cancer, isn't it? Nobody thinks
22:40you've got to be cured 100 percent.
22:41Today, Sarah will hear the results of preclinical testing on her lung cancer vaccine.
22:57If we're able to trigger an immune reaction, it would be a really encouraging sign that we were
23:03on to something. Hello. How much do I want it? I mean, it matters more than anything.
23:16Well, I think without much ado, Zeed, we're very much looking forward to hearing
23:21the results of your preclinical testing.
23:26So I've tested the efficacy and I know if I take it during the prime response,
23:31I get very good efficacy of the vaccine. Here you can see the green cells suggesting that
23:40the vaccine can be taken by immune cells directly. But I think it's really important to actually do
23:46the actual clinical trial to see if what I'm seeing actually represents what we will see in patients.
23:53Well done. Very good. That's very exciting.
23:58The next step is for us to put together a trial package to the MHRA and they would like to see
24:03some efficacy data. Then they'll give us a clinical trial authorization, a CTA,
24:08and then we can go ahead with, you know, getting the study up and running. So we need to
24:14get on with it and get the funding. That's the next challenge.
24:16I hope I'm going to be able to get funding, but actually we haven't so far.
24:27I just put in another application to some funders. This is the third time and I'm waiting to hear
24:32whether or not we've been successful. So the next few weeks are going to be a little bit stressful.
24:37Science is always like this, unfortunately.
24:39You know, you have to, there's no guarantee of funding. You've got to just keep on going.
24:53The success of the vaccine depends on something crucial,
24:57understanding the earliest stages of cancer's development.
25:00Another area of Sarah's research looks for key insight about how tumours start.
25:08The Millie study is focused on people with a condition called Lee-Fraumeni syndrome.
25:14Most have inherited a mutation in one of their genes that means that they have a 90%
25:22risk of developing cancer. And so we're sort of testing an intervention in that group.
25:26This study is very important for us because it teaches us about how cancer starts. It will help us
25:36design interventions like vaccines that we can then give to communities such as people
25:42at high cancer risk, like those with Lee-Fraumeni syndrome, but can also be used in a sort of broader
25:48context to protect the general population against cancer in the future.
25:52200 people with Lee-Fraumeni syndrome are being recruited to the study. One of them hoping to join is Ella.
26:02When I was nine months old, I wasn't eating. I was crying all the time. And my mum just couldn't
26:10work out what was wrong with me. And the doctors told my mum that she was just being a first-time mum,
26:16she was just worrying. But my mum was so persistent that eventually I had an ultrasound scan,
26:24and it filled a tennis ball-sized tumour on my adrenal glands.
26:30This is the scar I've had since I was nine months old.
26:34Just because of the size of it and because of how small I was, they had to make a very large incision.
26:40I was literally cut in half and as I got older and I've grown, the scar has just grown with my body.
26:49When I was a teenager, I always wished I didn't have it and wondered what I'd look like without it.
26:54Obviously young girls wear prop tops and when I got my belly button pierced, I thought it would look nice,
27:00but obviously I look different to everyone else. But I'm used to it now. It's a representation of what my
27:05body's been through and how strong it is. I've had this my whole life and it's the only way I've ever
27:10known my body to look.
27:15Somebody with Leigh-Fraumeni is at risk of cancer at any time in their life. And many will have their
27:22first cancer diagnosis before the age of 30, and then will continue to have cancer diagnoses all the
27:29way through their life. And you're in a constant state of vigilance, really frightened that any day
27:34now you might get your next cancer. When I got diagnosed with breast cancer, I had six rounds of
27:41chemotherapy and there was then a discussion whether I should have radiotherapy or not.
27:47I had the double mastectomy in December 2022 and I had my nipples removed in April 2024.
27:54And the mastectomy scar goes all the way under from here to here and then down the front here.
28:04A lot of patients with Leigh-Fraumeni syndrome have been told that it's basically a death sentence
28:18and you are just awaiting for cancer at any given moment.
28:27Hope is everything. If you don't have hope, then what are you fighting for? Hope is what keeps me going.
28:32Every day I wake up and I think that today's a fresh start. A day to try something new, I guess.
28:38When you think about designing a prevention trial, you need to show that your intervention is working.
28:44And that is hard. It's really hard. You're waiting for a lack of cancer.
28:54Hello. Hi. Hi Ella. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you. Come on in.
29:00I've had all these surgeries and they've not even been for preventative measures.
29:04They say have a preventative mastectomy, have a preventative hysterectomy.
29:08I've not had any preventative procedures yet. I've still had five major surgeries.
29:13So it's not about just taking bits out of my body. It's about what we can do to stop having
29:19any surgeries at all to stop the cancers from ever happening.
29:24Right now, I don't think my body can take any more.
29:28At Oxford's Churchill Hospital, Professor Sarah Blagdon is recruiting participants for a trial,
29:51which may give clues about how cancer starts.
29:56Ella has Lee-Fraumeni syndrome, a gene mutation that raises her risk of developing the disease.
30:04The Lee-Fraumeni community was very underserved.
30:07And they have an aberrantly high risk of cancer. So they don't follow the same trajectory as normal cancers.
30:18And they can't have certain treatments that others can have.
30:21And that just seems wrong. Why are we allowing such a high risk community to not test anything in them?
30:30Why are we letting that happen?
30:33What Sarah learns from this study will help to design new vaccines to prevent cancer.
30:38Not only in people like Ella, but also the rest of the population.
30:43We know that Lee-Fraumeni is caused by a mutation in the p53 gene.
30:48If you imagine your cells as a kind of factory, p53 is like the safety manager.
30:53If anything happens that's abnormal in the cell, the role of p53 is to stop everything,
31:00pause everything, correct whatever's going wrong, and then allow the cell to start up again.
31:06If it's a situation where whatever's going on in the cell isn't repairable,
31:13then p53's job is to get rid of the cell altogether.
31:16If you have a mutation in p53, the risk of cancer goes up.
31:23So there was some research carried out in the States trying to understand exactly what happens in
31:29the cells of someone with LFS. And one area that keeps coming up is the mitochondria.
31:35Our mitochondria are tiny structures within our cells that are like miniature boilers.
31:44They convert our food into energy, which then really powers our entire body.
31:50And in people with Lee-Fraumeni syndrome, mitochondria are thought to be overactive. And a byproduct of
31:58that is that the cells become damaged as the boiler itself is damaged, making them much more prone to cancer.
32:06Studies have shown that an existing diabetes drug called metformin works by turning down that boiler
32:15and therefore protecting the cells from becoming damaged. And this, we hope, will prevent cancer from starting.
32:22And from that, I want to start thinking about developing a more targeted drug instead of metformin,
32:30or that could be used in addition to metformin.
32:32And after the study, how long until a drug is developed, that can mean LFS patients have access to it?
32:41Yeah, I mean, it depends what we find. It could be that there is an agent that's already out there
32:45that we can repurpose. Or we could, for example, develop something bespoke like a vaccine that you
32:51could give. And, you know, we can turn that around fairly quickly with today's technologies.
32:56So hopefully within my young lifetime?
32:59I'm hoping.
33:02The information we get from that study is relevant for people beyond that heightened risk population.
33:12It's to me. Thank you so much.
33:14Because this gene also misbehaves in other cancers as well,
33:19and actually makes them much more aggressive. So it's really helpful for us to understand how and why
33:25that happens. I think when you see someone like Ella having to sort of have these
33:32very serious thoughts and conversations with doctors about her chance of going just through to the next
33:40year without cancer and having to sort of think about that every day, it's very humbling. And it's
33:45also very shocking. And it just, it surprises me that more hasn't been done in the past to help that
33:52community. And from that community, we'll find the answers that will be important for everyone else.
33:58So it makes total sense to work in that group and try and help them.
34:04I do really think that.
34:05I just cannot imagine abandoning them at this point.
34:13Around 130 people in the UK are diagnosed with lung cancer every day.
34:24Sarah has an idea under consideration to trial the world's first vaccine to prevent it.
34:35It's great to have the idea, but it's actually seeing it through. That's the, that's the painful
34:41bit. And we still don't know that we've actually got funding, which feels very scary.
34:48Sarah recently had a funding application refused.
34:54I just felt completely traumatized about it. I feel like there is this kind of meteorite that's
35:02landing on earth every day, that's killing people. And I feel like we've just watched it fall.
35:08Yeah. I just felt beside myself. I just thought, I cannot, I cannot let this happen.
35:15I mean, funding is vitally important. Yeah. Because without that,
35:20we can't pay people to do the research. We can't buy the equipment that we need. We can't pay to do the
35:25analysis we need to do. We can't manufacture a vaccine. We can't fund a clinical trial.
35:32I think if we don't get funding, then I think the momentum would be lost.
35:37We are desperate to get the study going so that one day in the future, everybody can get the vaccine.
35:46My tree? Your tree.
35:55Yeah. I used to sit up there for hours on end, just watching everything.
36:02Cancer's not only a professional challenge, but it's also a personal one.
36:06Mum was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, but fortunately quite an early stage.
36:16OK, so what are you taking? Let's have a look.
36:19I'm taking those. Different ones for morning and different ones for evening.
36:22So those are your blood thinning agents.
36:26I think to some extent it does give you a different perspective when you're kind of on the other side.
36:32This one's got to be taken, one to be taken each day, so I take that in the morning.
36:38So that's the breast cancer tablet. Oh, right.
36:41Actually seeing somebody at home on their own, really trying to understand which of their medicines
36:46they need to take, it does cast it in a different light.
36:50So what's the plan? Well, I think it's the 16th.
36:54You're having the operation? In the afternoon.
36:56Yeah. To something or other.
36:57I think it's in my diary, so I'm going to come and join you.
36:59Right. So you're having day surgery and they're going to take out the...
37:02The nodule. Yes.
37:07She's widowed. I think it would be a horrible time to get, you know, to get a really advanced cancer.
37:13I think it would be really hard.
37:20Four weeks ago, Sarah submitted her latest funding application for the lung cancer vaccine.
37:25We really want to make sure that we're describing the project, describing the overall,
37:37our overall ambition to hold. Oh, hey. I've just got the, I've just got the email. Let me have a look.
37:45I think this is the email, the funding. Okay. It is. Ah! Okay.
37:55Right. Please see the attached feedback from your recent submission.
37:59Your application for the above study was recently considered. And I'm pleased to inform you
38:06that it was recommended for support.
38:16Actually, that's an IDA. Hold on.
38:17Zee? Hi.
38:23Hi. It's Zee. Zee, just quickly to tell you, we've got the official funding letter. We have,
38:29we have been funded. So congratulations.
38:32Oh, well done. Thank you.
38:34Well done, you. I'll speak to you later.
38:36See you later. Okay. Bye-bye.
38:37Okay. Bye-bye.
38:38Bye-bye.
38:40My God. I can't believe it. That is such, that's massive.
38:50It's a green light. We know that we can actually start designing the study. And if we show that it's
38:55beneficial, then the sky's the limit. We can, we can just keep designing, you know, using similar
39:02approaches to prevent other cancers. I mean, I've, this is a really important, I think this is a really important
39:09kind of pivot point in what we're doing.
39:32When Trevor's skin cancer spread to his liver in 2022, he was given just 12 months to live.
39:41Today, he's at Churchill Hospital in Oxford for the results of a scan that will show just how active
39:46his tumours are.
39:47Ah, good afternoon. You're again. How are you doing?
39:51How are you doing?
39:53Ah, all right.
39:53You're doing 17, sir.
39:5517. Okay. Lovely. Thank you very much.
40:00Fair to say I know my way around, you know.
40:03You get to know everybody.
40:05And I've seen a lot of staff come and go.
40:08A lot of patients come and go as well.
40:12Fortunately in some cases, unfortunately in other cases.
40:16We are about to see Trevor and he has been on our study where he's had immunotherapy in
40:23combination with a targeted drug for two years.
40:26He's got metastatic melanoma and so he has got about 10 deposits of cancer in his liver.
40:35So a couple of weeks ago, he had a PET scan and my question was, are we still measuring active
40:41disease or is this just the remnants, the remains of where his cancer was?
40:45The positive result will be all the cancers dead and inactive.
40:50But realistically, I'm not expecting that.
40:53We're waiting to see. We're waiting to see.
40:54It is...
40:55I'm not jumping the gun and looking ahead.
41:00A major part of the job of an oncologist is giving results to our patients.
41:08I think sometimes you can just see someone
41:10is just desperate just to know and be told things very clearly.
41:15And you don't want to extend their misery and you don't want to drag it out.
41:24Knock, knock.
41:25Hello.
41:26Hello.
41:26Hi.
41:26Good afternoon.
41:27Right, I'm just bringing this trolley in.
41:28Yeah.
41:29Hope you don't mind.
41:30It's my imaging station.
41:31No, it would be a good idea.
41:34Great. Okay.
41:36So the reason we did the PET scan was to see whether there was
41:39any active tumour cells in there.
41:42And your scan shows no active disease.
41:48Was it nothing?
41:49That's right.
41:50Each lesion is clear.
41:52Um...
41:55Oh, yeah.
41:56I'm sorry.
42:00Yes.
42:06Sorry.
42:07No, don't worry.
42:09Yes, yes.
42:23Er, shocked.
42:25Obviously, because I wouldn't, er...
42:26No, my body's dreams, I wasn't expecting that.
42:33Not at all.
42:34There was an intake of breath at the meeting this morning about it.
42:37Really?
42:38Yeah.
42:39So that means that we can stop the treatment.
42:44Well, yes.
42:45Yes.
42:49So I can just go home and that's it then?
42:51So you can go home and have your life back.
42:52Yeah, maybe we can organise our trip to Australia now.
42:56Yeah.
42:56New Zealand, but yes.
42:57So you can safely say you're in remission.
43:00Obviously, we don't want to say the word cure, because we don't really know.
43:03No, no, I understand that.
43:04But I think, you know, this is as good or better than we could ever have expected.
43:11Lovely.
43:12Thank you very much for that.
43:13Worth the journey up.
43:14Yeah.
43:14When a patient like Trevor demonstrates that a treatment is working, it is so powerful,
43:23because he's demonstrated that people with this disease have the potential to benefit from the
43:29treatment, and that opens so many doors for other patients with the same condition.
43:34It's a bit of a hit when you're told you've got cancer and you could have, you know, 12 months to live.
43:41So, you know, that's always in the back of your mind, even though you're feeling great and whatever.
43:45So it'd be really nice now that I can forget about that.
43:50Oh, I spent some hours sat in this seat having treatment.
43:55So now I can move on and enjoy life and enjoy retirement.
44:03I've just been giving it all clear.
44:04Oh, my God.
44:05Oh, Jim.
44:05Oh, thank you very much.
44:07Yes, thank you.
44:08I'll probably never be back.
44:10That's good.
44:11No.
44:12Yes, they will.
44:12Oh, that's really lovely news.
44:24It's three years since Sarah first had the idea for her lung cancer vaccine,
44:29and so today is an important step towards finally delivering it to the public.
44:34I think to be able to see and hold the vaccine for me will be a very pivotal moment in my career.
44:46Hello.
44:46And to actually have tangible evidence that we can deliver something is going to be extraordinary.
44:56Wow.
44:57This is the world's first lung cancer prevention vaccine.
45:03I can't quite believe it.
45:07It's like my third baby.
45:11Well, I just hope that we can get this out as quickly as possible to benefit as many people as possible,
45:18not just in the UK, but around the world.
45:21I mean, this could be the way that cancer is prevented.
45:34Well, we can't be able to do it as a virus.
45:36This is the end.
45:37I can't believe it.
45:37It can be great.
45:38I'm so happy to see.
45:39I'm so happy to see you.
45:40Well, that's a perfect person.
45:40I think this is the world's first lung cancer.
45:40I have to know.
45:41I'm so happy to have it.
45:42Well, it's not too hard.
45:42I can't believe it.
45:43I'm so happy to have it.
45:44I'm so happy to see you.
45:44It's a perfect person.
45:57I'm so happy to have it.
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