By Kirsten Weir
Imagine cancer as a line on a chalkboard. At the left is a healthy cell. Reading left to right, you can follow a cell’s journey as it begins to develop abnormalities, morphs to become a localized cancer, and finally metastasizes to an advanced cancer at the far side of the spectrum. “As a field, we’ve been spending a lot of time looking to the right. The opportunity now is to look to the left,” says Robert Vonderheide, MD, DPhil, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center and the John H. Glick Abramson Cancer Center Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine. “Can we intercept those precursor lesions before they become cancer?”
That is the promise of the burgeoning field of cancer interception.
Read more about cancer interception on the Penn Medicine News Blog.