Q and A: Dr Mark Matfield

A new prostate cancer drug that could save thousands of lives has been hailed as a major breakthrough. Dr Mark Matfield, of the Association for International Cancer Research, explains why.

What did you think when you heard about this new drug?

I thought it sounded extremely promising. It has been tested on patients with advanced prostate cancer and currently we really have no good treatments for that at all. Although the results are very preliminary, they do look very good indeed.

Are we getting too excited about this drug too early?

We have to be careful, but I think we can be optimistic at this stage. A lot of the good news stories we get on cancer research are at a much earlier stage than this – at the stage of basic lab research. In this case, we are talking about a real drug tested on real patients that is really helping them. So it is quite a long way down the line.

Should patients feel hopeful because of this study?

Definitely. This is a type of cancer that has got no good treatment, and this seems to be our first effective treatment for it. But we do need to test it out more carefully. It has only been in a handful of patients so far. Once it has been tried out on hundreds of patients, we can be more confident that it really is going to be useful.

How often would you expect a discovery of this importance to happen?

This is a once-in-five-years or once-in-ten-years type of discovery. This is really significant.

What will be the next big discovery in cancer?

There's a whole new generation of cancer drugs coming out now. These new drugs are intelligently designed – based on a detailed knowledge of how a cancer works. In the past, we have not had that sort of understanding.

Will we ever see a definitive cure for cancer?

No, because cancer is not one disease. It is at least 200, and maybe 500, different diseases. It is many diseases with many different causes and will require many different treatments.