Wigan grandad Peter Hurst was given just six to nine months to live after being diagnosed with cancer. But he is going strong three years later and is supporting a fund-raising appeal by The Christie for research to help other cancer patients.
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00:00 He told me they got small cell cancer which is one of the worst ones.
00:08 It was like somebody hitting me in the chest with a mallet. He said he'd got 69
00:17 months to live. It was devastating. Devastating for my family as well.
00:25 They were very upset. It was about six or nine months into my treatment. I went
00:35 for a scan and they told me that it really hadn't, it was still going, it
00:43 wasn't receding. Well apart from the anxiety side of things and never far
00:52 from your mind what might be going on. It's fearsome really, not knowing.
01:02 Drug resistance is actually a really common problem across many tumour types.
01:11 So patients may respond very well initially to their cancer treatment and
01:16 that might be chemotherapy or one of the new targeted therapies.
01:19 Unfortunately what often happens in some cases the tumour comes back. The type of
01:24 lung cancer that I work on and I focus on it's almost every patient that will
01:29 become resistant to their therapy. This is an extraordinary time for a cancer
01:34 research portfolio and ambitions in Manchester. We have an extraordinary new
01:38 building that's going up and opening soon that will house both researchers
01:43 and clinicians together. Everything comes about by research, nothing ever moves
01:52 forward without research. So it's really really important. Other diseases have
01:59 been eradicated in the past so hopefully you know cancer will at some point.
02:09 Having the best PhD students as part of our program is critical to generating
02:14 those ideas and actually carrying them through to really elegant research
02:18 that'll be world-renowned and impactful for our patients. So what my lab is known
02:24 for is our work on circulating tumour cells. So we can collect these
02:27 circulating cells in the bloodstream of the patient before they have their
02:31 chemotherapy and we can make a model to study in the lab. So the student has an
02:35 amazing opportunity to study that drug resistance.
02:40 I would say that if you can give anything to help with this research it's
02:50 really really something that helps people like me. I don't know what I would
02:56 have done without the research that's gone on. Thank you very much.
03:02 you
03:05 you
03:07 [Music]