[Christine MH-UK]

This is a great project, but I think that the project material is too technical. I wrote something in plain English to explain why this project helps cancer patients (particularly breast cancer patients).

How The "Defeat Cancer" Project Will Help Cancer Patients
I am excited by the "Defeat Cancer" project's potential to improve treatment for cancer patients in three ways.

First, it will increase the chances that patients will get the treatment most likely to help them. If patients get the wrong drugs, they can suffer serious side effects, such as heart damage, unnecessarily or have their cancers get bigger or spread. At present, doctors try to match treatments to the characteristics of cancers, but in a rather inexact manner. Because I had a high-risk cancer, my doctor gave me four months of chemotherapy before surgery to check whether the treatment worked. This chemotherapy was so difficult for me that my mother moved in to look after my baby. Unfortunately it failed to shrink the tumor, so I needed a second type of chemotherapy, which I found easier. I had little faith in chemotherapy at that time, but I am doing well nearly three years after diagnosis.

Second, "Defeat Cancer" will help patients by enabling scientists to develop more targeted treatments. I am very fortunate because I have had an antibody drug, designed to target a genetic flaw in my type of breast cancer. This drug halves the likelihood my cancer will come coming back and is less toxic than traditional chemotherapy drugs. Before scientists started using a targeted approach to my type, it was one of the worst types to have, but this may be no longer true. Because targeting cancer traits has worked so well, scientists are looking for more targets. They might use the "Defeat Cancer" database to look for cancer types that are linked with rapid death after diagnosis or poor long-term survival. They could then develop drugs to target these types. They might also learn more about why some cancers do not respond to standard treatments and how to make them less resistant.

Finally, this project will produce a large database of cancer information for researchers in a very short period. At present studies looking for different types of breast cancer use hundreds of samples, but "Defeat Cancer" will provide data for thousands of samples for breast and head and neck cancers. The World Community Grid is sending samples to individual computers just days after scientists have scanned them in, helping to speed up improvements in cancer treatment.