• Question: How will your science save the world?

    Asked by Noel12 to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 4 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      Hi Noel12,

      In my science, I try to make new drugs to treat a horrible tropical disease, called leishmaniasis. It can cause people to die if they don’t get treatment and also causes horrible skin infections (Google leishmaniasis if you want to see some nasty pictures). Some of the drugs we use to treat the disease at the moment don’t work as well as they used to because the parasites that cause leishmaniasis are getting used to them. Each year, scientists estimate that there are over one million new cases and 30,000 people die from the disease. So hopefully my science may be able to help these people in the future!

      Hannah

    • Photo: Jenny Batson

      Jenny Batson answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      Hi
      Unfortunately I don’t think my science will quite save the world but hopefully it can make a difference to peoples lives and health. We’re making new drugs to treat age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular oedema, which are the biggest causes of blindness in the developed world. Currently treatment is really expensive and patients have to go to hospital to have an injection into the eye every month. We’re making cheaper drugs as eye drops, so they will be much easier to administer and will save people time, discomfort and money and make life easier!
      Jenny

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 6 Nov 2016:

      Hi Noel12,

      Well saving the world is quite a big challenge! If things were to work perfectly well for me, then I could potentially discover a new anti-cancer drug that would selectively kill over 90% of all cancer tumours whilst not being toxic at all to healthy cells (the rest of your body). This would be the first ever drug to successfully work on this particular target, which would be pretty awesome!

      In reality though, things are always much more complicated, and the molecules that I make will likely have other side effects even if they do manage to kill many different types of cancer cells! Currently I’ve developed some molecules which have the most selectivity for this particular target out of any known to date, however it’s far from perfect, and my current problem is that some of the most selective ones also have sugars in them, which are chopped off by enzymes inside the cell, rendering them non toxic! (we have a few ideas how to solve this problem though.)

      As I said in another post, cancer is responsible for 1 in every 3 deaths in the UK, and it’s predicted that 1 in every 2 people born after 1960 will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in their lifetime.
      (http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2015-02-04-1-in-2-people-in-the-uk-will-get-cancer)
      That has to be one of the most depressing statistics that you will ever read, and clearly it’s a terrible disease that rips families apart and causes so much pain and suffering. Everyone knows someone who is affected by it. Clearly we as scientists need to do everything we can to change that statistic!

      I’m just one person working on a very small, specialised area of research, it might amount to nothing, but then again if we all work together then who knows what we might achieve, and where breakthroughs will come from!

    • Photo: Oliver Charity

      Oliver Charity answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Noel!

      Interesting question, as Steven said I only do a small part of science, and this could amont to less than we think!

      I look at how bacteria can evade being killed by viruses, so that we can use these viruses to kill nasty bacteria in animals and in humans. This could provide safer food for many countries around the world, and produce new therapies to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria. Bacteria resisting antibiotics is a real problem, and it could kill a lot of people in the future.

      Having new, diffent therapies would potentially save millions of lives, so not quite the ‘whole’ world, but if one person saves two lives, surely their life is twice as good? 😉

      Oli

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