Understanding Cancer Research

Описание: More than one billion dollars is spent annually in the U.S. on breast cancer research. This video will help you understand the types of research those dollars fund.

Transcription:

[00:00:06] Dr. Susan Love: Hello, I'm Dr. Susan Love, the Chief Visionary Officer of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. Our mission is a future without breast cancer, and we do that through innovative research into the cause and prevention of the disease. Impatient science is a series of videos that we've made to help explain to you the options for treatment, and guide you along the way.

[00:00:28] Speaker 1: In the US National Library of Medicines PubMed database, there are links to more than 324,000 studies on breast cancer. Starting with one published more than 100 years ago. Those studies demonstrate how we have been gradually figuring out breast cancer, and how to treat it. Today over $1 billion is being spent annually on breast cancer research in the US.

[00:00:50] Speaker 2: Most of the time, research proceeds two steps forward and one step back, and key areas are often overlooked because they're just too hard to study in people.

[00:00:59] Speaker 1: Basic research seeks to understand the molecular biology of the cancer cell and how it functions. This kind of research, also called bench research, is usually done in a laboratory with cells in petri dishes or on laboratory animals like rats or mice. While basic research can give clues to basic biology, rats and mice don't normally get breast cancer, so it can only take us so far.

[00:01:21] Speaker 2: Women are different than rats, because once we develop breast tissue, it stays with us our whole life. For this reason, basic research should ideally be done on women or their tissues.

[00:01:33] Speaker 1: Once a treatment or procedure shows promise at the basic level, it may be further explored in human volunteers. This is called clinical research. Clinical studies of breast cancer typically focus on understanding the disease better, or on treating it with new drugs and surgical techniques. They can also include studying lifestyle changes and other ways to reduce risk. While clinical studies focus on individuals, epidemiology looks at large populations to uncover risks factors for cancer development. The Nurses' Health Study and California Teacher Study, are two of the largest epidemiology studies in the US. They are looking for risk factors for cancer and other diseases in women.

[00:02:12] Speaker 2: Epidemiology studies gave us the first hint that hormone replacement drugs increase breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women.

[00:02:20] Speaker 1: Translational research, bench to bedside, and bedside to community, are three terms to describe combining basic research, clinical research and population based research into one study. Often, patients are randomized or randomly assigned to one group or another. This is how new treatments are compared to standard treatment, with each group receiving one or the other.

[00:02:41] Speaker 3: Thank you.

[00:02:42] Speaker 2: Once a drug is shown to work in a clinical trial and approved for use, researchers will monitor to the drug to see if it's effective in a wider population and document any side effects or collateral damage the drug may cause in the real world.

[00:02:57] Speaker 1: Treatments that are based on this type of clinical research are often termed evidence-based medicine. You can participate in research through the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundations army of women, which recruits women and men with and without breast cancer for all kinds of research studies.

[00:03:13] Dr. Susan: At the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, we'd like to end breast cancer, but until we do, we want to make sure you understand what your choices are. If you want to support us, go to DrSusanLoveResearch.org or you can join one of our programs and help us get to the end of breast cancer.