For Trish Dwight, hanging up her lab coat to help communicate cancerA disease where abnormal cells split without control and spread to other nearby body tissue and/or organs. Cancer cells can also spread to other parts of the body through the bloodstream and lymph systems. research more broadly within the community wasn’t a difficult decision. Most of her lab-based research involved rare cancers, so she knows how difficult it can be for people with rare and less common cancers to find helpful information.
She believes complex research findings can be conveyed – so they’re understood by everyone. The more knowledge people have about their cancer – including relevant research findings – the more meaningful discussions they can have with their healthcare team.
Ensuring people have the information they need to make informed decisions will allow them to play a role in their health journey more easily. She shares more about her passion for empowering people to make decisions that are right for them:
Life as a cancer researcher
As a researcher, you spend your time immersed in various stages of the research lifecycle. Obtaining funds to conduct research, designing, and carrying out experiments, analysing and interpreting results, and sharing those results with the scientific and medical community.
Research always creates additional knowledge and highlights other questions that need addressing. So, for those like me who are problem solvers at heart, it is a truly exciting space to work in, as there are always questions to answer!
I’ve been a cancer researcher for over 20 years. In that time, I’ve seen significant advances in the field of cancer. There are too many examples to list. However, a real stand out for me has been the revolution in personalised medicine that ‘next-generation sequencing’ has enabled. Our ability to rapidly sequence a human genome, identify disease-causing variants, and recommend effective treatments – all within a clinically relevant timeframe – has and continues to improve outcomes.
If someone were to ask me what gave me the most satisfaction as a cancer researcher, it would be being able to answer questions that were important to people. Like being able to identify a genetic variant responsible for someone’s tumour. For some, this knowledge brings a sense of relief, as it gives people a reason – especially if they’ve been searching for answers for many years. That’s what I’ll miss most about the lab – those moments when you know you’ve played a role, even if very small, in helping others by providing them with an answer.
A shift in focus
There are two main reasons I decided to hang up my lab coat and move into the science and medical communicationHow we talk to each other; how we share our knowledge, what we know with each other. space.
One thing I noticed as a researcher was that although we’re good at communicating our findings within the scientific and medical community, we’re not so good at sharing the significance of our research with the broader community.
The other thing I became aware of as a researcher was a strong desire for people to understand more about their health conditions, including research being conducted.
Over the years, I’ve had many friends and family ask for help. What I’ve found most insightful is that they’re not asking me to make medical decisions for them (thankfully, as that’s beyond my qualifications!). They’re simply asking for information.
Information that will help them understand their condition better, what options may be available, why certain options may not be available to them, what research is being conducted and how it may be relevant to them – to list just a few. Information that enables them to have more robust discussions with those managing their healthcare. Information that allows them to connect the dots and make sense of the medical jargon.
Most importantly, they’re looking for information that will enable them to play an active role in their health journey. To make them feel like they’re part of the decision-making process.
Making sense of the vast amounts of complex information
Did you know cancer researchers publish the results of their studies every day? Last year alone, there were over 44,000* cancer-related studies published worldwide. That’s over 100 cancer-related research articles published every day!
On the one hand, this reflects the tremendous amount of energy and effort to understand cancer and, in doing so, improve outcomes for those affected by cancer. For those with cancer, I hope this gives you some sense of the number of researchers who are in your corner – striving every day to help make a difference.
On the other hand, I find that amount of information quite overwhelming – as it takes time to distil and translate that amount of scientific knowledge so it can be more broadly understood. It also saddens me to think that a vast amount of information generated by research is only ever seen by those working in the field. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather hear a story about the significance of a research study on the news each day than hear daily updates on the misdemeanours of our politicians.
This is why I’m hanging up my lab coat – to help communicate the findings of cancer research more broadly within the community. I hope that by turning complex research findings into more easily understood information, people will have more meaningful discussions with their healthcare team. Enabling people to play a role in their health journey more easily and empowering them to make decisions that are right for them.
*Based on PubMed search of ‘cancer’ with the following filters applied: (i) includes articles published between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022 only, and (ii) excludes ‘books and documents’ and ‘review’ articles.