Question: If you found a cure for cancer, how would you break the news? It's just such a big thing, globally, so how would you back up your statement to be sure people believed you, and trusted it was safe? :)

Wei Xun answered on 17 Jun 2011:

Wow you have just described what the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies dream about everyday!

So there’s a few things you will have to do:
1)convince the scientific community that what your drugs actually works,by publishing in journals, and other scientists must also be able to repeat your findings that this wonderful new drug works
2)convience the doctors that your new drug is better than what’s already being used
3)Do enough testing so that you know how much of it a person can safely take, and what side-effects they can expect from it
All of these need to be first tested in healthy volunteers or patients with the disease you’re trying to treat, and if everything is ready you can apply to a regulator for a licence to make this drug exclusively. The entire process can take decades.

In a simpler case,a professor in my department has found that certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) cause cervical cancer, and a vaccine was already available, but not approved yet. So it was rushed to the front of the queue so that it could be allowed to be made and given to young people. This was tried out in a small area to see if everything works as expected, then the scheme was expanded to the entire country. If the bigger scheme is also successful, hopefully other countries will learn from our experience, and set up their own schemes.