Question: have you/are you involved in research about cancer ?

Jennifer Harris answered on 8 Mar 2019:

Hi Isabelle,

I have been involved in cancer research in three different ways:

(1) Outreach and public engagement: telling the general public about recent advances in cancer research and the importance of cancer research

(2) Research during my Masters & PhD: I spent nearly 5.5years researching skin cancer and looking at how the immune system fails to kill cancer cells in early stages of disease. As the immune system is critical to fighting cancer, my research looked at ways in which you can switch it back on.

(3) Policy: So there are lots of new therapies being developed with are specific to patients, called CAR-T cells. These are immune cells taken from patients which are engineered to detect the specific cancer cells in that patient’s body. At the moment there are only two approved methods of doing this that are supported by the NHS. Our policy challenge, so the challenge to Government is making sure these new treatments are safe for patients – so well regulated; that we can support more of these therapies being developed – both in terms of skills and expertise; number of hospitals running clinical trials and the research capacity to understand how they work. The Government must also be able to provide these treatments at a reasonable cost. However because they’re so specific to patients, the model for costing is very complicated. These are the types of questions are try and help answer in my current job.