Hopeful signs for a gentler fight against cancer

A reader reflects on Curium’s nuclear medicine breakthrough and calls for wider awareness and faster access to treatments

Sir,

I read your piece on Curium’s nuclear medicine work (Summer 2025 edition, cover story, p.16 and online here) with great interest. As someone who has seen close relatives go through the rigours of chemotherapy, I found it encouraging to hear about treatments that can target cancer so precisely while sparing healthy tissue. The idea that tumours can be attacked from the inside out, rather than blasting the whole body, feels like the step change oncology has been waiting for.

That said, I couldn’t help but notice how little most people outside specialist circles seem to know about radiopharmaceuticals. If Curium already helps more than 14 million patients each year, why is this field still so invisible in public discussion? Perhaps it is because the drugs often come under generic names, or because nuclear medicine doesn’t have the profile of more widely advertised therapies. Either way, greater awareness would surely help patients make more informed choices.

What also stood out to me was the company’s reinvestment of profits into research. In an era when “big pharma” is often accused of putting shareholders first, this struck me as a more patient-focused model. Whether others in the sector will follow suit remains to be seen.

The article left me hopeful, but also curious. If this approach really can be applied to a wide range of cancers, how quickly will patients in the UK actually get access? As with so many medical breakthroughs, the science seems ahead of the system.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Turner, Manchester, UK