The Good News About Cancer

Vaccines have long been used to treat many diseases, but cancer has not historically been one of them. At the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Vinod Balachandran and others are working to change that. In this episode, Chuck talks with Dr. Balachandran about his work on a vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer.

In the past few decades, we have made huge strides when it comes to reducing mortality from lung cancer. Gone are the days when cigarettes were allowed in restaurants – improvements in prevention, screening, and treatment for lung cancer have completely changed the narrative. In this episode, Alicia and Chuck talk through the good news about lung cancer with Dr. Christine Lovly, Division Chief of Thoracic Medical Oncology at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center.

More than a decade ago, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania treated a patient with her own T cells, which had been engineered to recognize and target the cancer cells in her body. The treatment, which is called CAR T cell immunotherapy, is now widely used for patients with leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. Today, scientists like Saul Priceman are working to take this therapy to the next level, making it effective against as many cancer types as possible. He talked with Chuck and Alicia about what his lab is doing to improve CAR T cell immunotherapy.

New research is helping us to better understand the connections between nutrition and cancer risk. Alicia and Chuck talked with Mathilde Touvier, one of the global researchers studying this issue. She’s a nutritional epidemiologist based in France, and her lab is looking at the effects certain food additives have on our risk of developing cancer.

Huge strides have been made in diagnosing and treating childhood cancers, but most of those benefits are seen in the wealthiest countries in the world. This leaves hundreds of thousands of children in need of adequate cancer care. Dr. André Ilbawi with the World Health Organization tells us about their initiative that aims to bridge this gap, and deliver services to children in low and middle resourced countries with the goal of saving one million children by 2030.