Lung cancer can strike anyone. This is the message that the American Cancer Society highlighted last October. People who smoke, people who quit smoking and even those who have never smoked are all susceptible, with smokers being at the highest risk.
In Malta, lung cancer has been the most common cause of cancer-related deaths, with a specific type called Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) being the most common and the most difficult to treat.
Lung cancer initially appears as just a few cells in a particular area in the lung. Over time these start growing at an uncontrolled rate, resulting in a tumour.
This causes symptoms, which may include a persistent cough (sometimes with blood), shortness of breath, hoarseness, chest pains and unexplained weight loss, although these symptoms can also be due to other unrelated conditions.
Lung cancer may also spread to the bones, especially the spine, pelvis and upper bones of arms and legs, and also to the liver and brain.
There are several treatments, which are indicated for lung cancer, with chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery being the main approaches.
However, mortality due to this disease remains significantly high, with only a few patients surviving five years after diagnosis. The best way to reduce the risk of lung cancer is to avoid smoking, as well as second-hand smoke.
Indeed, 80 per cent of lung cancer patients are smokers. Inhalation of certain substances such as asbestos and other cancer-producing chemicals, especially on a regular basis at the workplace, may increase the risk and should be avoided.
A team at the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Malta has been working in collaboration with CNRS researchers in France as well as Mater Dei Hospital, in order to study new approaches to managing NSCLC.
The researchers are using certain synthetic DNA compounds, which affect the way in which certain lung cancer-related genes work.
Our aim is to combine these novel reagents with other drugs in order to try to selectively kill off lung cancer cells, whilst having minimal effects on healthy ones.
Work is initially being carried out on commercially available lung cancer cells, which are being grown in a laboratory, but the team plans to study cancer cells from patients who have undergone lung cancer surgery.
Together with foreign collaborators, the team will be culturing these cells in a laboratory, using special techniques, which resemble the tumour 3D structure, and studying how this treatment affects the DNA and protein biochemistry of these cells.
This approach hopes to eventually provide a novel way of increasing patient survival, and reduce the spread of lung cancer.
This research would not have been possible without the funding provided by the Malta Council Science and Technology (MCST), under the Technology Development Programme (TDP), as well as our entire research team made up of several dedicated postgraduate and undergraduate University of Malta students.
Sound Bites
• The ability to detect and react to the smell of a potential threat is a precondition of our and other mammals’ survival. Using a novel technique, researchers have been able to study what happens in the brain when the central nervous system judges a smell to represent danger. The study indicates that negative smells associated with unpleasantness or unease are processed earlier than positive smells and trigger a physical avoidance response.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211014100139.htm.
For more soundbites, listen to Radio Mocha every Saturday at 7.30pm on Radju Malta and the following Monday at 9pm on Radju Malta 2 https://www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/.
DID YOU KNOW?
• You spend 10 per cent of your waking hours blinking.
• Before reluctantly deciding on the word ‘viewer’, the 1935 BBC Sub-Committee on Words considered many terms for their “users of television apparatus”, including auralooker, glancer, looker-in, seer, sighter, teleobservist, viewer-in, visionnaire, vizzior and witnesser.
• A recent study found that when at a bar, the later it is, the more attractive you feel – regardless of how drunk you are.
• In January this year, a 500-year-old painting from the School of Leonardo was recovered by police from a cupboard in a Naples flat before the museum it had been stolen from even realised it was missing.
For more trivia, see www.um.edu.mt/think.