The lecture given by Dr. Rebecca Chin on the subject topic was excellent. Not only did she explain the extremely useful knowledge very clearly, understandably and systematically but she has also inspired me to explore further, particularly on two main areas, which are precaution against cancer and CAR-T cell therapy.
Regarding precaution against cancer, as mentioned by Dr. Chin, the most important thing is to prevent cancer from emerging and thus screening is needed for early detection of cancer. From the internet, I learnt that getting screening tests regularly may find breast, cervical, and colorectal cancers early when treatment is likely to work best. Therefore, by linking the four causes of cancer and screening together, for those people who are exposed more to radiation, have more contact on some kinds of chemicals, get infected by certain diseases or have cancer record of their family members, they are the high-risk groups that should do the screening test regularly to prevent emergence of those cancers.
As for some other cancers like ovarian, pancreatic, prostate, testicular and thyroid cancers that screening hasn’t been shown to reduce deaths from them, I hope that through my tertiary studies in Biomedical Science, I could be equipped with more solid knowledge and be able to find out more advanced screening method so that these cancers can be screened out effectively with related death rate being reduced.
The second main area to explore is on CAR-T Cell Therapy. Apart from reviewing again the video shown during the class, I found that there are useful websites providing relevant information such as the background of CAR-T cell therapies, different types of the therapies for different targeted diseases, how CAR-T cell is made, effectiveness & side effects, more targets and other usages by CAR-T cell. I can’t help highly appreciating Dr Allison and Dr Honjo for their pioneering research that led to novel approaches of cancer treatment by inhibition of negative immune regulation. Furthermore, I hope that I could deep dive my studies on this therapy in order to find out how to minimize severe side effects, including a mass die-off of antibody-producing B cells and infections, cytokine release syndrome (CRS), as well as its neurologic effects; and also what could be done to reduce the cost as the prices, which range from US$373,000 to US$475,000 depending on the specific drug and indication, are too high to make it widely applied.