Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cure review – This documentary about the vaccine is so inspiring it will make you cry | documentary

CEx-Inquisitors: Finding the Cure should come with a rare warning: It may leave you feeling hopeful about humanity and a little less convinced that we’re all willingly jumping into the wheelbarrow and paving our way to hell.

This is a watch that shows the work being done to create vaccines against cancer. Lung cancer, specifically, is at the moment – ​​50,000 cases of it are diagnosed each year in the UK and it is the most common cause of cancer-related death – but with the potential to prevent many more in the future.

That such a wonderful possibility emerges from the realms of imagination is because of the progress that has been made in understanding the body’s immune system and the work it does to stimulate many cells (a medical term), perhaps on a daily basis, when they first begin sending signals that all is not well within their bodies, preventing them from multiplying. Until and unless of course the day comes when the signals are muted or missed and cancer results. Survival rates for this disease have doubled in the past 50 years, but diagnosis itself is on the rise, so the race to beat it continues unabated.

However, new understanding of how our bodies pick up and dispose of many potential catastrophes means that there is now a known time period, a pre-cancer stage which is thought to last up to 10 years, and which we can intervene in if we know how.

Entered, amidst all possible fanfare – even though everything about her suggested she would avoid it – Professor Sarah Blagden. Who knows how, and will jump in if she can get funding for the next clinical trial she needs to run.

We meet some of the people under her care, including 68-year-old Trevor from Portsmouth who has skin cancer with secondary cancers in his liver. For a year, his wife asked him to get the mole checked. “I had to do it,” he says. “But that’s life.” “A typical Navy man,” says his daughter, Katherine, wryly. It is now part of the professor’s current trial. His immune system is trained to attack cancer cells that were previously invisible to him. The growth on his liver is now fixed. In their consultations, we are presented with the rare sight of the doctor looking happier than the patient. You can almost see the feeling of triumph – very quiet, but it is there – Start building there. It’s amazing.

Professor Blagden’s ultimate goal is to develop a single vaccine that prevents multiple types of cancer. This will help patients like Ella, who suffers from Li-Fraumeni Syndrome (LFS), which causes a mutation in a tumor suppressor gene and means its carriers are at high risk of developing cancer, especially in children and young people. Ella had a tennis-ball-sized tumor removed from her adrenal gland when she was nine months old, and she also developed breast cancer which led to her having her breasts removed three years ago. She is still in her twenties. She is also in one of Professor Blagden’s experimental groups, working on the potential shown by metformin (a drug commonly associated with diabetes treatment) to reduce excess cellular activity in patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which could allow for repurposing that would speed up the creation of a multi-faceted vaccine.

You can cry for suffering, but also for minds that focus not only on alleviating it, but on eliminating it. For the extraordinarily intelligent vision of Professor Blagden and her team (“I have a big idea…” she says at the beginning of the film), and their dedication, to all the research and researchers who came before her, to unite the people and technologies they have built to defeat this single enemy that is killing so many of us and our loved ones.

You can also, unfortunately, cry over Professor Blagden’s attempts to secure funding. All the results she’s had so far are promising, and she knows her patients are one step closer to being helped in truly unprecedented ways. “I can’t imagine giving them up at this point.” But her last request was rejected. “I was beside myself.” She is being interviewed by the filmmakers at her desk when the email arrives. Interrupted to read the news. The financiers deemed it worthy. “It’s… a really important focal point of what we do,” she says, which is Blagden lingo for “Come on, cancer, your time’s up!”

The film ends with her holding the first dose of the vaccine in her hands, with the news that Ella remains cancer-free and in the new trial, and with Trevor hearing that he has no signs of any active cancerous deposits anymore. “In my wildest dreams, I didn’t expect this,” Trevor says. The professor just smiles. I did, you see. I did.