by Cancer treatment is in the edge of a golden age, said the highest -ranking doctor in the NHS.
Sir Stephen Powis said that treatments “develop at such a pace” that a diagnosis should no longer be considered a death sentence. In recent years, progress in immunotherapy, medication and early detection has improved survival rates, with thousands of patients now live longer and with a better quality of life.
It compared the recent progress in combating cancer with the way the treatment of AIDS has been revolutionized in the past four decades.
“As a young doctor, I saw the terrible pain and death outs for the patients. Then you see as when you roll the clock forward, successful therapies.
“We are now at the point at which it is a disease that can be managed, and people can live a normal life that could not have imagined in the dark days of the 1980s. If you look at this wider time frame, then medicine does not proceed?”
Medicines that train the immune system to kill cancer cells and genetic tests that personalize the treatment will be part of a “treatment revolution” in the coming years, he told the Times. “Cancer treatment becomes much more individual. This is driven by genetics.”
In his last interview, before he resigned as a medical director of NHS England, he said: “We are at the level of a gold era in terms of the way we treat a number of cancer.
“For many types of cancer, people should be confident that it is not a death sentence and that more treatments will be available.
“Our understanding of the genetics of cancer, the way we aim for cancer with certain medicines and how we can use the body’s own immune system to aim to target cancer itself.
Half of the population is ill in life, and 385,000 people are diagnosed every year in Great Britain.
Better treatment means that half of them survived 10 years after a diagnosis compared to one of four in the 1970s. In breast cancer, three out of four women survive at least ten years after the diagnosis.
Lung cancer will become “much less common” due to vaccines that identify in clinical studies and tests that identify the genetic profile of lung and breast cancer tumors, so that patients can quickly receive personalized treatment plans.
A revolutionary blood test that enables personalized cancer treatment is already introduced in a world on the NHS.
He also claimed that the ban on smoking for younger generations would lead to the elimination of some types of cancer.
“Some of the diseases that I have seen in my 40 years will be rare diseases for doctors in the next 40 years. The lung cancer I hopefully saw will be very rare due to the interventions we made.
“We cannot prevent all types of cancer, but there are types of cancer that we can certainly prevent,” he said.
