Janice Walsh

So for us, we've enjoyed progress in breast cancer management for a long time.

But a lot of our very difficult to treat cancers, such as ovarian cancer or pancreatic cancer, have had a really important development.

And I should add lung cancer in there, too.

Okay, just on lung cancer, we did hear overnight about a development in that area too, where we have this set of proteins identified now in the blood that may accurately predict who is going to develop lung cancer.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating really, isn't it?

And this kind of work is happening in all different cancer types.

But our problem with lung cancer is very often it is found late and therefore incurable.

And if it's not incurable, people have to go through very aggressive chemotherapy and immunotherapy type regimens.

And we know that earlier detection means that patients do better.

And of course, the Irish Cancer Society is funding a very large pilot study looking at the early detection of lung cancer at the moment in patients with

who are at higher risk.

So I suppose this article, you know, it's very preliminary, but essentially what it's doing is it identified these set of proteins that are in the blood, which are involved in inflammation, which is one of the buzzwords in cancer development at the moment.

And essentially what they have noted is that if you have these proteins, you may be at higher risk of developing lung cancer, particularly if you have been exposed to high risk behaviour.

So I suppose the big one would be smoking.

And then the other one which you have no control over is possible air pollution.

And I think this signature has also been identified to be activated in people with diabetes.

Benign conditions such as COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, so people you would see going around with oxygen needs, or pulmonary fibrosis.

And when they looked then at that signature in trials that have used various anti-inflammatory medication, what they did note was that those patients who'd received the anti-inflammatory medication had a lower incidence of lung cancer now.

Is this practice changing?