Informative Speech On Cancer

Cancer. Does anyone have a guess at how people it’s going to affect? It’s going to affect 1 out of 2 of us and 1 out of 4 of us will die from it. With all of its special abilities ranging from making abnormal cells grow at a rapid pace to hijacking normal protective checkpoints in our immune system, it’s almost impossible to create one nice cure for this disease. Each case is different since cancer doesn’t have a uniform way of attack. It just keeps on going until the human body can’t take it anymore and POOF. But recent research has discovered a potential weapon to win our fight against cancer. It’s called precision medicine.

Precision medicine is probably unfamiliar to many of you which is actually okay because the term didn't even exist
That’s a lot to take in so I have a simpler analogy to give you a general idea of what precision medicine is. Let’s take basketball as an example. Everyone knows what that it is, right? Okay. Each player has their own skill set. Some players can shoot 3 pointers all day while some struggle. Some players can dunk like there’s no tomorrow but some can’t imagine the idea of dunking in the first place. Essentially, each player has their skill set and things they need to improve on. So what coaches do is take this information and make a plan to make them a well-rounded player. This is exactly how precision medicine works. You look at how the cancer is affecting one's body and what changes are made in their DNA and make a customized plan. The hope of precision medicine is that treatments will very soon be according to the varied genetic changes in each case of cancer. Scientists all already picturing a future where genetic tests will assist in deciding what treatment a
The new treatments that scientists have recently designed to target a very specific change are being tested across North America in precision medicine clinical trials. To figure out which genetic changes are found in a case of cancer, a biopsy may be performed. A biopsy is a procedure in which your doctor removes a sample of cancer. This sample will be sent to a special medical lab which has a machine called a DNA sequencer. It keeps an eye out for genetic changes that are allowing cancer to grow even more deadly. Treatment using precision medicine can be expensive. It takes scientists many years or even decades of research to fabricate novel treatments that target the changes that cause cancer to develop, grow, and spread. Once many of the genetic changes are discovered, another area of research that is currently going on involves looking for drugs that can target these changes, then test these drugs on real-life people in clinical trials. One of the final most important areas researchers are working on is understanding the problem of drug resistance that potentially doesn’t allow some therapies to work as good as others. Many researchers believe that precision medicine is the key to unlocking these secrets. As you have heard, implementing precision medicine into real life requires