• Question: What influenced you to start researching cancer?

    Asked by anon-269926 to Madhumeeta on 18 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Madhumeeta Chadha

      Madhumeeta Chadha answered on 18 Nov 2020:

      Hi Zara, thank you for the question. I initially had no plans of getting involved with cancer research. My grandparents had cancer and unfortunately passed away due to the disease and I wanted to do nothing with it.
      However, at university, I started learning more about the biology of cancer and grew fascinated. Cancer cells are notorious for tricking the body into believing all is well and take advantage of normal cell signals, hormones for their growth or evading the immune system. I wanted to understand some of these processes in greater detail and gravitated towards cancer research.
      I have always wanted to help people and improve healthcare in some way. Cancer research allows me do this as well.

Comments

  • Photo: Tammy

    Tammy commented on :

    I got into cancer research after actually getting into microscopy. I worked as a cytoscreener – screening cervical smear samples for cancerous cells. These days they screen for cervical cancer using HPV testing but before there would be rooms of people using brightfield microscopes scanning all the slides. I moved to Edinburgh in 2006 to take up a job in a pathology research lab and they needed someone with a lot of microscopy experience to produce data (i.e. count tumour cells by eye) from all their cancer clinical trials samples. And the rest they say, is history.

  • Photo: Ann

    Ann commented on :

    Hi Zara, I know you did not ask me this question but I hope you don’t mind me giving you my answer.
    I did not plan to work on cancer at all. But when I was studying how our bodies fight off viruses such as flu I found out that we could boost the immune system to kill viruses by instructing a special type of immune cell called a killer T-cell how to find where the virus is in our bodies and to home there. By doing this more killer T-cells went to flu-infected lungs and killed the virus much quicker.
    This got me thinking about whether we could make more killer T-cells home to cancers and kill the growing cancers more quickly. We have shown this to happen in the laboratory. Now we want to find out if it also happens in cancer patients and this is a very exciting possibility so we can’t wait to find out if it does!