A leading British-based cancer researcher, Dr Peter Campbell, is cautiously confident about making further progress in the fight against cancer, but warns it remains a ''slippery'' long-term threat.
Some cancer researchers are confident that some skin cancers will soon become less significant because of improved treatments, and for today's children the overall cancer burden will be somewhat smaller in the future.
Dr Campbell (44), a University of Otago medical graduate, is a haematologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England, and head of Cancer Genetics and Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
He has recently been visiting the University of Otago pathology department on a Colin Geary Visiting Professorship.
Asked how optimistic he was about making improvements in the fight against cancer, Dr Campbell said he was cautiously optimistic, acknowledging improved skin cancer treatments, and some other improved outcomes.
A decade and more ago, researchers tended to have a more ''monolithic'' view of cancer, but powerful tools in genetic analysis had shown how various cancers were, and also the large amount of variety in human biology and in the response of individual patients to disease and treatment.
Patients presenting with similar cancer test results and given similar treatment often had ''completely opposite outcomes'' , he said.
Dr Campbell yesterday visited the laboratory of Prof Antony Braithwaite at the Otago department, met another Otago pathology researcher, Prof Margaret Baird, and visited the Otago Zebrafish Facility.
Dr Campbell said that 25% of human deaths were from cancer, and that overall toll was likely to remain similar in the foreseeable future.
That was also partly because doctors were ''getting better at treating competing causes of death'', such as from heart disease.
Early diagnosis of cancer remained important, but this remained challenging for some organs, such as the pancreas, found deep inside the body, he said.
Although a great deal more had been learnt about cancers, they remained a ''slippery'' foe, he said.
Personalised medicine, partly based in detailed genetic analysis of individual patients and their respective tumours, raised the hope of improving treatment outcomes but care would be needed in adopting new approaches, including in making sure that medical evidence was still being used robustly, he said.
