What are the most important advances in cancer treatment?
Some important advances in cancer treatment include the study of epigenetics, the study of psychoneuroimmunology, and the study of vaccines. Watch oncology researcher Kelly Turner, PhD, explain these exciting, recent developments in cancer treatment.
Transcript
So even if you have, for example, the BRCA gene for breast cancer, there may be-- and we're learning, but there may be some behaviors that you
can change in order to turn that gene off. [MUSIC PLAYING]
In terms of important advances in cancer treatment that I'm most excited about, I would say there are three. The first is the field of epigenetics.
That is the study of how our behaviors can impact our genes, our genetic expression.
So what we eat and even what we think or how we act can turn our genes on and off. And this includes oncogenes, which are cancer genes.
So it's really exciting to know that our genes are not necessarily our destiny and that we have some control.
So even if you have, for example, the BRCA gene for breast cancer, there may be-- and we're learning, but there may be some behaviors that you can change in order
to turn that gene off. So I'm very excited about the field of epigenetics. The second field of cancer research that I'm really
excited about is psychoneuroimmunology, which is a field of science that studies the interaction between our minds, our brains,
and our immune systems. And what I love about this is that it's really studying the mind-body connection so that we're
learning that different ways of thinking and habitual patterns, so taking time to laugh every day versus making yourself
stressed all day long, even five minutes of laughter, we're learning, can greatly impact your immune system by increasing the number of white blood cells
and increasing the number of natural killer cells. So psychoneuroimmunology is a field that I'm really watching carefully.
And the third field that I'm very excited about in terms of cancer research is the vaccine field. So there's a lot of different third-stage trials
going on right now looking for the cancer vaccine. And that's because your immune system actually knows how to take care of cancer cells
if it knows that those cancer cells are there. So cancer cells are very good at hiding in your body. They put up a chemical mask.
So you might have a very strong immune system, but it will just walk right by that cancer because cancer is putting up a chemical mask.
So with a vaccine therapy what we're doing is we're trying to wake up the immune system to look under rocks and realize that there is cancer there
and it should take care of it. And the vaccines are what is teaching the body how to do this. [MUSIC PLAYING]
cancer
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