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Interviewer: Hello Professor Schiffman,
thank you very much for
sparing the time to do this interview with
us today, it's very much appreciated.
We will be talking about pediatric
cancer predisposition and
what we need to move the field forward.
To start with,
what are some of the main problems in the
field of pediatric cancer predisposition?
Prof. Schiffman: Thank you for
the opportunity to speak with you today.
Let's take a step back before we get to
there being problems and discuss a little
bit of the background in terms of
where cancer comes from in general,
because that will inform the discussion of
what we need to move the field forward.
One of the things we know about cancer is
that every time a cell divides there's
an opportunity for
that cell to turn into cancer.
Many recent studies have shown that
in the normal healthy population,
as we age there's an accumulation of
mutations in the cells in our body.
Of course that makes sense, the longer you
live the longer your stem cells have been
around to divide and
produce daughter cells, and
the more opportunities they've
had to accumulate mutations.
Most of the time those clonal
mutations are not pathogenic, so
they don't lead to cancer,
they're sort of passengers but
just stochastically every once in a while
they are going to turn into cancer, and
that's why we see that as
we age cancer increases, so
typically cancer is thought
of as a disease of aging.
Other work including some
recent studies by Tomasetti and
Vogelstein have shown that the more
often a stem cell divides,
the more susceptible that
organ is to developing cancer.
That's all well and
good, but what does that have to do
with pediatric (childhood) cancer?
We know that there's actually an increase
in childhood cancer when people are born,
