People will be familiar with the HPV vaccine, which is already widely used and has been phenomenally successful.

Absolutely.

I mean, we're really seeing for once that a, a cancer might be completely eradicated, which is so exciting.

And what that vaccine does is it basically prevents people from getting HPV, which is the virus that causes cervical and other cancers actually as well.

But unfortunately, not all cancers are actually sparked by a virus, so we have to have a different approach, and that is to really understand the early changes that happen in cells before they become a full-blown cancer and whether we can vaccinate against those early changes, and that's really the principle that we've been operating with in Oxford.

And ultimately, might there be a way of reaching other types of cancers that affect other parts of the body where you can target pre-cancerous cells?

Definitely.

We have a project that's being led by Professor David Church, which is looking at preventing colorectal and endometrial cancer in people who have Lynch syndrome.

Could you just tell us a little bit what inspired you to pull away from the war to go back to science, to go back to discovery? I'd love to hear that story, Sarah.

Yeah, well, I think when I started in medicine, one of my first early jobs as an SHO was on a ward, an HIV AIDS ward.

And at the time, it was coping with the sort of peak of HIV AIDS.

And, you know, it was full of young men mainly dying.

It was horrible, really tragic.

Then sort of overnight, combination retroviral therapies came in and the ward pretty much cleared.

It was kind of really exciting to be on one of those pivot points in medicine.

What inspired you to look at RNA? Maybe you could just explain to the listener why it turns out that RNA rather than DNA is such an important thing for us to be focusing on to understand the kind of invasiveness of a potential cancer.