Fight against cancer needs longer-term strategy

Paul Nurse

Without funding for long-term research, cancer treatments based on existing knowledge will plateau in a few years, predicts a top international cancer scientist.

Sir Paul Nurse, the former head of Cancer Research UK, believes the New Zealand Government is putting "far too much emphasis" on short-term projects focused on gaining immediate results.

"You need work in the three to five-year window - don't misunderstand me - but you also need to be thinking 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now," he said.

"Good science takes a long time and to engage creative individuals, you can't just instruct them that they have to work on something with immediate application because it's like instructing Leonardo da Vinci that he has to draw a horse just like this. It's like Soviet-style art."

Now president of Rockefeller University in New York, Sir Paul is in New Zealand for the triennial Rutherford Memorial Lecture series sponsored by the Royal Society of New Zealand and London.

Sir Paul, with fellow Briton Tim Hunt and American Leland Hartwell, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001 for their work on genes that regulate the cell division cycle - the process that takes a fertilised egg from a single cell to the 100,000 billion cells that make up an adult human, or an accidental mutation that leads to a cancer tumour. He will lecture on the advancement of the concept of the cell as a logical, computational machine. Until now, research has focused largely on the chemistry and physics that go on inside the cell, he said. But by looking at the "informational processing that goes on in cells", researchers can gain a better understanding of how life works.

"Cancer treatment is [helped] ... by the improvement in the understanding of cancer and the molecules involved in it already, and we're seeing new drugs appearing.

"But if we only have a one-dimensional view of the problem we may produce a drug that looks like it's going to work and then it has effects elsewhere that we haven't predicted."

It was a common occurrence in the pharmaceutical industry, he said.

"That's largely because they don't understand how it works in the first place. The knowledge we have at the moment will lead to some improvements but they will then plateau. To get more improvements, we have to understand things even better."

Sir Paul said science funding at the moment is being pushed "very, very hard towards immediate applications that will just run out within a couple of years".

It was also unstimulating work, and will not engage the best brains in science.

"If you're wanting to attract people in, you're going to have to give them some curiosity. We want the Leonardo da Vincis of science."