Prof. Jörg Beyer, cancer researcher at the Berlin Tumor CenterDW-TV: To what extent are our chances of developing cancer genetic? Jörg Beyer: Well, there are genetic risks and there are familial cancers and its about 20 - 30%. You can put it that way - our genes load the gun, we pull the trigger.   Is it possible to examine a healthy person with a family history of cancer and predict when he or she will get ill from what type of cancer? Well, we can assess the risk and there are certainly people who have a higher risk than the normal population than the remaining population to developing cancer - but taking a thorough family history we can identify many of those individuals. My message is; they need genetic counseling. They cannot just go to their home doctor and not even every cancer doctor can do genetic counseling. These people need to see a specialist, experience in reading the genome, and experience of giving competent and professional advice. Has cancer research profited from the mapping of the human genome? Enormously. This was a revolution. I mean we can read now the human genome like a book, like an encyclopedia and we can read the mistakes, we can see the mistakes. That has been a revolution for cancer treatment and for cancer research and it will eventually turn out to be a revolution for cancer treatment. What will the cancer drugs of the future look like? Very specific, very specific. They target the mechanism the cancer cell uses to exhibit the malignant behaviour and the more we know about how the cancer cell ticks, the pathway the cancer cell is using, the more precisely we can attack and disturb these pathways. By knowing these pathways and their aren’t that exceptionally many, we can directly target these and this area is real. We have the first drugs that exploit this knowledge and they are tremendously effective. They also sound tremendously expensive. Will cancer treatments become more affordable in the future?...