Cancer treatment game-changer is great news for us sufferers - Steve Cardownie

In case you missed it, this paper’s front page on Saturday heralded what could be a breakthrough in the quest to find a cure for skin, lung, bladder and kidney cancers.

Under the heading “Cancer trial is a game changer” we were told that Edinburgh had been chosen as one of eight centres in the UK to take part in trials of a new treatment.

Hailing the “world-first cancer therapy” the accompanying article stated “The worlds first personalised mRNA cancer jab for melanoma - which also has the potential to stop lung, bladder and kidney cancers – is being tested in British patients.

"The ‘game changer’ jab, which offers hope of a cure, is custom-built for each person in just a few weeks.

" It works by telling the body to hunt down cancer cells and prevent the deadly disease from coming back.”

The UK arm of the trial aims to recruit patients across eight centres, including Edinburgh.

Great news indeed and the Evening News rightly gave it the prominence it deserved by devoting its front page to the story.

One in two of us will get cancer in our lifetime and I should know because I am one of the ones.

So, any development of a potential cure will be heartening news to at least 50 per cent of the population and to the other half who are likely to have relatives who will be directly affected.

In the meantime, I cannot stress enough that early detection and intervention is of paramount importance.

My prognosis is good, and my prostate cancer seems to have been caught and treated early enough to warrant a great deal of optimism for the future on my part,

I did not have any symptoms but was found to have a cancerous tumour on my prostate in any case.

Google it and if you qualify, get it checked – if we all did, there would be many more brothers, fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers walking this earth than there is now!