Gwen Ifill has died

Are you familiar with her work? I think she's was breath of fresh air compared with other baby boomers in the industry. I, for one, will miss her.

I'm not a doctor but have been dealing with cancer in the family. I think we will soon see much more use of fine-needle techniques in cancer treatment in novel ways.

Perhaps the next big thing will be an oil-and-gas engineer adapting drilling, guiding and visualisation technologies to the very small scale.

Directly killing the cancer cells is often futile because you can't kill them all, but we could also use this tech to:

* take samples of the the tumour and its microenvironment to analyse and guide treatment

* inject biological agents into tumours (e.g. T-Vec)

* inject "broad-spectrum" immunotherapies (ipilimumab, various cytokines) which may be too dangerous to use systemically

* insert radioactive grains or auger targets as an adjunct to enhance immunotherapy

* apply local electroporation to enhance the uptake of chemotherapy and breakdown of tumour cells, again to enhance the immune response (e.g. ImmunoPulse)

* take samples in order to grow personalised treatments in the lab for later injection (e.g. dendritic cell therapy)

* provide safer options for dealing with complications like pericardial effusions.

A brilliant response without being condescending. Thank you.

Yup. Plants get cancer too - it's called burls. But they don't have a circulatory system and therefore it doesn't spread to the rest of the body. So it's more of an annoyance.

I'm not a doctor but just had a loved one die of cancer, and what the parent has said is correct from what I learned. Here is a breast cancer survival breakdown by stage:

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/breast-can...

Stage 1 they do pretty much exactly what you propose: lumpectomy (take out the tumor), radiation (zap tumor cells in a localized way) and chemo (poison yourself, but with a poison that especially likes to kill tumor cells). The survival rate after 5 years is 99%.

By contrast you have Stage 4 with a survival rate of 15% after 5 years. This is when the cancer has metastasized. This basically means the cancer isn't just in that body part (in my link, the breast), it's all over the body. For my loved one there were many many tumors on the lungs, kidney, liver, and tailbone. Even worse, it's in the blood, which means even if you could remove all these tumors (and put your body through horrible trauma to do so), they would still come back. At this point you don't cure the disease, you treat it and hope for the best. There are many many different types of treatment. Some won't work for a specific person, some will, but only for awhile, and if you're very lucky some may cure the person, but there are no guarantees and doctors play a bit of a guessing game.

Although there are many different types of cancer, in these later stages there are very few ways a person dies. The cancer breeds in places with high cell turnover in mission critical organs (lungs, kindneys, liver) and you die.

while it may seem similar in principle, it is very different at the detail level - radiation even while it is done from several directions still seriously hits a lot of healthy tissue (even proton "knife"). And i think the radiation burn (at the level of several Sv per session deposited at the tumor site) while is definitely deadly for the cells isn't exactly the thermal burn, with cells dying differently and thus different by-products, etc. With the local IR burning by the probe you can also suck the "ash" out right away saving the body from the burden of dealing with the massively dying cells' by-products.