A significant part of modern biophysical research is aimed at combating cancer. Why is the problem of cancer not being solved as effectively as in the case of many other diseases? How important is international cooperation in this work? Marco Durante, Director of the Biophysics Department of the Helmholtz Center GSI (Germany), told the correspondent of the Social Navigator project of the Rossiya Segodnya MIA about this.
Professor Durante, do you think science will soon defeat cancer?
- This is a very good question, but, unfortunately, there is no answer to it. Even US President Nixon once said that he was going to defeat cancer within 10 years. And you see what the result is …
Scientists have many times found strategies to combat cancer. But then it turned out that cancer is not in a separate group of cells, but in biological tissue. Cancer is "smart" and finds different ways to spread.
Today, the immunotherapy method seems very promising in the fight against cancer, but time will tell. Over the next ten years, we will understand whether he helps or not.
- What other scientific approaches besides immunotherapy will help in cancer treatment?
- Today there are three main approaches. The first is local therapy, which includes surgery and radiation therapy. The second approach is systemic therapy, which includes chemotherapy and hormone therapy. And the third approach is immunotherapy and targeted (targeted) therapy.
Most patients today receive all three types of treatment. This combined approach is the most successful.
Promotional video:
Of course, if you look at mortality from cancer, then in Western countries it has not decreased significantly. But if you look at the cases of cure, the statistics go up. These two facts are related to the fact that human life expectancy is increasing.
Cancer is a disease of old age. In the old days, when a person died at the age of 40 from infections and other causes, there was almost no cancer problem. Many people today die of cancer simply because they live longer.
This is why it is so difficult to defeat cancer: from an evolutionary point of view, we are not programmed to fight this disease, since we were programmed to die at a younger age. Well, since we have begun to live longer, we will have to solve the problem of cancer.
- How do you assess the contribution of Russian scientists to the fight against cancer?
- I want to state with certainty: they have made a very large contribution to this area of science. In particular, Russian nuclear physicists have done a lot to develop modern particle beam therapy.
The problem, as I see it, is that Russian scientists lack information about the research of foreign colleagues, and we mutually lack communication with each other. The level of scientific research in Russia is actually very high. And foreign colleagues often do not know about this, since they cannot read publications in Russian. We only know about the existence of Russian scientific groups and centers, but we do not know about the results of their work.
Russian scientists need to publish more in international scientific journals and attend international conferences. This problem needs to be addressed, we need to work more together.
I would like to note the high level of training of students in Russia. Many Russian students work in my laboratory in Germany, including from NRNU MEPhI, and they are much stronger than their German peers.
In general, NRNU MEPhI is moving, in my opinion, in a very right direction, developing scientific research in contact with foreign colleagues. As far as I know, this university has set itself the goal of becoming one of the most advanced universities in international rankings. This is a very ambitious task, and the development of international cooperation should help to achieve it.
The interview was presented within the framework of the III International Symposium "Engineering and Physical Technologies of Biomedicine", organized by the National Research Nuclear University "MEPhI" (NRNU MEPhI).