• Question: how do you think that you can create a cure for your disease and when do you expect the cure to be avalible to the public?

    Asked by acmh28 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      We’re one tiny part of a global drive to bring new drugs to bear on our disease. At present the first generation of these new agents have been available for about a year, they seem to be very successful. If everything pans out (and it may not), we’d hope to be seeing fewer and fewer people needing liver transplants in the future.

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      My lab group is looking into a treatment for multiple sclerosis rather than a cure (completely making it better). The treatment consists of “tolerising” the body to myelin which surrounds the nerves and is attacked. A bit like with a peanut allergy – “tolerising” the person by giving them little bits of peanut until the body doesn’t react against it anymore.
      I hope that in the next 5-10 years this will be available to the public as a treatment.

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      I’m working on a drug that will give the immune system a bit of a boost, so that it comes up stronger and faster against cancer. We’re still at the very early stages of testing the drug – we don’t know everything it does in our body, and whether it’s on balance good for us or not! I’m doing experiments to figure that out now. I’m hoping that by the end of my PhD (that’s in 2 or 3 years) we’ll actually know whether this drug is a good idea, and then we have to think about trying it out in human patients – how much to give in a dose, and what other therapies we can combine it with. It’s a long long process, and I think, even if everything works out well, it will be 10 years before it’s made available in the clinic.

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I’m not working on a cure for the diseases I study – instead I am looking at where they came from and how they evolved. When studying a disease it is important to know all about it, as this is helpful when looking for treatments and cures.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      I’m more interested in finding out why the diseases I’m interested in happen in the first place, and what can be done to make sure that, even though the bacteria might be there, that they don’t cause problems.

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