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Home » How We Can Slow Down The Spread of Cancer: Hasini Jayatilaka (Transcript)

How We Can Slow Down The Spread of Cancer: Hasini Jayatilaka (Transcript)

Hasini Jayatilaka at TEDxMidAtlantic

Here is the full transcript of cancer researcher Hasini Jayatilaka’s TEDx talk: How We Can Slow Down The Spread of Cancer @ TEDxMidAtlantic conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio: How we can slow down the spread of cancer by Hasini Jayatilaka @ TEDxMidAtlantic

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TRANSCRIPT: 

Hasini Jayatilaka – Cancer researcher

Cancer – it’s a devastating disease that takes an enormous emotional toll, not only on the patient but the patient’s loved ones as well. It is a battle that the human race has been fighting for centuries. And while we’ve made some advancements, we still haven’t beaten it.

Two out of 5 people in the US will develop cancer in their lifetime. Of those, 90% will succumb to the disease due to metastasis.

Metastasis is a spread of cancer from a primary site to a distal site through the circulatory or the lymphatic system. For instance, a female patient with breast cancer doesn’t succumb to the disease simply because she has a mass on her breast. She succumbs to the disease because it spreads to the lungs, liver, lymph nodes, brain, bone where it becomes unresectable or untreatable.

Metastasis is a complicated process — one that I’ve studied for several years now. And something that my team and I discovered recently was that cancer cells are able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement based on how closely packed they are in the tumor microenvironment.

They communicate with each other through two signaling molecules called interleukin 6 and interleukin 8. Now, like anything else in nature, when things get a little too tight the signal is enhanced causing the cancer cells to move away faster from the primary site and spread to a new site.

So if we block this signal using a drug cocktail that we developed, we can stop the communication between cancer cells and slow down the spread of cancer.

Let me pause here for a second and take you back to when this all began for me in 2010, when I was just a sophomore in college.