Feb

This morning, at media gathering about cancer research at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, I was lucky enough to hear the scientist Tak Mak speak a bit about his work. Mak is the director of the hospital’s breast cancer centre — but you might know him as one of Chatelaine’s “Men We Love,” from our November issue last year.

To explain how our understanding of breast cancer has advanced over the years, Mak used this analogy:

“Imagine a big bowl of fruit. That’s what breast cancer is like. We didn’t know that before — that’s what research has taught us. We now know that there isn’t just one type of breast cancer; instead, there are apples and oranges and bananas and pineapples. In the past, we used the same drugs for everyone, and we didn’t understand that a treatment might do an excellent job with oranges, but nothing to bananas.”

Mak went on to say that researchers have come a long way in understanding that the aggressive breast cancer that hits younger women behaves completely differently than the type that typically affects older women. He described the newest treatments for breast cancer as “sharp-shooter drugs” — drugs that target the specific cells, instead of just killing (or removing) everything in sight. An example of these “sharp-shooter drugs”? Herceptin, which our formidable blogger Leanne Coppen wrote about this week.

Healthwise