freelance science journalist and author
From The Medical Republic, 30 October 2023: “Current evidence does not substantiate the claim that common cancer screening tests save lives.” As scientific mic drops go, it’s a doozy. The Australian government alone spends more than $400 million a year on screening programs for just three cancers – breast, bowel and cervical – and is … Continue reading Does cancer screening really not save lives?
From Nature, 12 October 2022: The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched health-care workforces around the world to their limits, as illness and burnout extract a toll from clinicians, nurses and staff. The need for innovations that can reduce workloads is pressing and has intensified interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics as potential technologies to help … Continue reading Pandemic’s cancer backlogs receive treatment from AI innovation
From Nature, 6 April 2022: When Melody Smith began her fellowship in haematology and oncology at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, she had no idea that she would soon be writing her own code, working with computational biologists and analysing faecal samples to understand the microbial composition — or microbiome — … Continue reading How gut reactions are shaping cancer treatment
From The Scientist, 1 April 2020: When the first anticancer therapies based on engineered T cells hit the market a few years ago, they offered the possibility of what would have once been perceived as a medical miracle: a one-shot cure for certain blood cancers. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies, as they are … Continue reading Nature killer cell therapies catch up to CAR-T
From Nature, 22 April 2020: When Jedd Wolchok began working in the area of melanoma 20 years ago, the average life expectancy for a patient with advanced disease was six or seven months. Now his waiting room is full of people coming back for their third or fourth year of follow-up, sharing their stories of … Continue reading Game-changing class of immunotherapy drugs lengthens melanoma survival rates
From Nature Outlook, 25 March 2020: When cancer was first described by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, he identified just two forms: the non-ulcer-forming carcinos and the ulcer-forming carcinoma. In the late nineteenth century, physicians found, with the help of the microscope, that cancer had multiple cellular forms. Now, technology is once again transforming our … Continue reading How cancer genomics is transforming diagnosis and treatment
From Monash Magazine, February 2015: Cancer chemotherapy is far from subtle. It effectively means carpet-bombing the body with a toxic regimen that kills cancer cells, but also obliterates a lot of healthy cells in the process. The ultimate hope with this approach is that the cancer surrenders before the patient does. But what if cancer … Continue reading Medicine enters the nano world
From Cardiology News, 9 June 2014: Children with heart disease are cumulatively exposed to relatively low levels of ionizing radiation from imaging procedures – less than the average annual background exposure in the United States – although those who have undergone more complex procedures such as heart transplants or cardiac catheterization experience significantly greater exposure, … Continue reading Radiation exposure in children with heart disease highest for transplants
From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 27 August 2012: Children exposed to blue asbestos may face more wide-ranging health problems in adulthood than mesothelioma and lung cancer, according to an Australian study. Researchers from Western Australia analysed health data from children who lived at Wittenoom, a now-abandoned WA town where blue asbestos was mined … Continue reading Asbestos may raise risk of non-lung cancers
Bianca Nogrady 