• Question: How close are scientists from making a cure for Cancer?

    Asked by anon-200563 to Rosemary, Oliver, Leigh, Jordan, Hannah, David on 4 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-200565, anon-200540, anon-200229, anon-200919.
    • Photo: Oliver Gordon

      Oliver Gordon answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      There are lots of different types of cancer – this is why some are more treatable than others, so we will almost certainly never find a “cure all” for all types of cancer.

      You see “a cure for cancer!!” a lot in the news. The reason why nothing much comes of them is that only killing cancer cells is hard. Setting somebody on fire would kill all the cancer cells – but all the good cells would die, too.

      What I would say though is that huge amounts of money (more than my field!) go towards cancer research – and lots of progress is made all the time.

    • Photo: Jordan Kirby

      Jordan Kirby answered on 4 Mar 2019: last edited 4 Mar 2019 2:15 pm

      Cancer is a difficult disease to cure because of what cancer is. As Oliver said there are lots and lots of different types of cancer which would make treating them all with a single “cure” very difficult. The problem comes from the fact that cancer cells were once your own cells and share alot of similarity to the other healthy cells. Finding a treatment that targets these Cancer cells and not your own is the tricky part and is what the research is still going into.

      The field has progressed so much in the last 20 years and survival rates are so much higher than they use to be. I am very confident we will eventually crack cancer and develop treatements.

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