tumour

The name explicitly comes from the appearance of a cancerous tumour.

This is a drug that works very well at shrinking tumours and controlling disease in incurable lung cancer.

It is targeted - it only works if your tumour has a particular gene fusion, which occurs in about 4% of lung cancer patients.

This, combined with the fact that tumours are, compared to normal tissue, often poorly vascularized, means just getting drugs in can be a major challenge.

It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost.

That's probably because papillomavirus inactivates two tumour suppressing proteins in order to allow the host cell to proliferate.

Consequently, it also raised the question of whether or not it's worth regularly checking tumour marker levels after their first cancer had gone into remission, as having to have blood tests every three months and waiting for results each time is stressful in itself.

As it turned out, while treating people once their tumour markers crossed a 'red line' meant that intervention started earlier, waiting for symptoms to be exhibited resulted in nearly identical life expectancy and also a higher quality of life as they'd spent less time on chemo.

Your comments about the stress of knowing that you might have cancer is interesting in light of a paper which my father published a few years ago about whether to restart treatment with people who had relapsed ovarian cancer when their tumour marker levels started rising again, or when they started to exhibit symptoms.