John Burn-Murdoch

So she's spoken in her work in this space, she's spoken to very wealthy people who have the financial means to pursue these avenues for themselves or their own families, so really high net worth individuals.

But even among this group, regulatory requirements mean some therapies are effectively unaffordable.

So surely unless we change how the clinical trial part of this works, we're only going to see the very richest people able to really benefit from the revolutionary treatments.

One thing that strikes me on that one is, how do we think about side effects with a truly N equals one personalised treatment?

And again, it feels like these things, even with all those caveats, are still very, very expensive at the moment.

But would the hope be, again, that when they become platforms, they become commoditized and that the prices drop rapidly?

That brings us on to the topic of money here, right?

I obviously understand that there is a certain inevitability to things getting cheaper as you scale them up.

But is there an issue here around the incentives on the firms involved to bring the prices down?

We've got a little punchy question here from a listener called Adrian who says, given the impact that this all has on equitable distribution of medicines, can we rely on Sojourn

to be fully impartial on the subject of intellectual property and the bias in favor of richer nations and their pharmaceutical giants.

Is there a fundamental conflict of interest here around getting these treatments out as cheaply and as broadly as possible, or are there incentives that will at least encourage companies to go slower on the cost reduction?

Thank you for those first two questions to Ruxandra and Adrian.

This next question is from Christopher, who asks, how far away does Sir John realistically think a cure for cancer is, and what makes you think that?

That's fascinating.

So this would be both a lifespan gain and a financial gain.

A huge financial gain.

And that, as you say, the key there is the early detection means that it's a more routine treatment.

And the other thing that strikes me as really interesting here is that

There's been this trade-off discussed about if we get too good at detecting cancers, you end up with a lot of people having these quite nasty invasive therapies.