Cancer has turned my life upside down . It touched my body, my deepest identity. I started questioning myself about the meaning of life, about death, about what it means to have a changing body that would soon undergo major therapies and go through early menopause.

Cancer: about one in three Europeans is confronted with this diagnosis during their lifetime. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center DKFZ in Heidelberg are investigating the development of cancerous cells to find out how their growth is controlled and what goes wrong in cancer cells.

In 2012, about 8.2 million people died of cancer making the disease a major cause of death worldwide. According to the WHO World Cancer Report 2014 , this figure is expected to rise within the next two decades.

Targeted therapies have revolutionised the treatment of cancer since they were first introduced. Amongst the first medications approved in Europe, was the breast cancer drug Herceptin , which was approved in 2000.

The impact if this challenge could be huge, as this set of data could l ead to new therapies and diagnosing tools for virtually all diseases , including diabetes or cancer.  Proteins are everywhere.

Smoking is the largest single cause of preventable premature death and disease , accounting for some 650,000 premature deaths each year in the European Union, according to official EU statistics.

We are all exposed to polluted air. Among main air pollutants are nitrogen oxides —the so-called ‘NOx ‘— and ozone , which cause irritation of respiratory tract and eyes, favouring cough, lung infections in children and asthma.

Diamonds are sometimes considered as a girl’s best friend. Now, this expression is about to have a new meaning. Indeed, nanometric scale diamond particles could offer a new way to detect cancer far earlier than previously thought.

Chances of survival of prostate cancer depend strongly on the stage at which the disease is diagnosed. Now scientists have developed new methods relying on an electronic nose and optoacoustics to improve the diagnosis techniques and avoid fatal treatment delays.

Cancer – one of the most widespread diseases of the industrialised West. Lung cancer is the most common among these. It is caused by smoking, air pollution and genetic predisposition – killing 240.

Professor Markus Affolter is in charge of a zebra fish embryo study researching angiogenesis, which means the recruitment of new blood vessels as a normal process in growth and development, but also as an essential component of tumours’ metastatic pathway.