• Question: Hi, my question is do you think we will find a way to cure cancer anytime soon? Because science seems so advanced yet cancer is one of the biggest problems we face but we still haven't managed to come up with a way to cure it

    Asked by Phoebe99 to Andy, Dwaine, Natt, Priya, Tatiana on 13 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by nick, yo_momma, Rinoa, georgina, sweatypeppers, ben.holmes, Owl, Beep Beep, Rebekah, The Milky Bar Kid MINUS, 950heac44, bluepenguin7, EM, Chyna, Frankenstien creation!!!!!, Chloe, bea, Albert Einstein, Mariha.
    • Photo: Natt Day

      Natt Day answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Hi Phoebe,

      Cancer research is one of the biggest areas of scientific research at the moment. And we’ve had some really important breakthroughs over the years. At this exact moment there will be a scientist somewhere discovering something new that will help us understand more about cancer and that information will ultimately lead us to be able to develop better preventative measures and treatments.

      However, there is a bit of a problem with the notion of curing cancer. Cancer refers to diseases in which there is abnormal, uncontrolled cell growth. Within the cancer umbrella there are over 200 different types of disease– which all have different causes. So we first have to figure out what mechanisms are going wrong in each of these diseases to cause the uncontrolled growth (and normally there’s more than one thing going wrong) and then start working on ways to stop it from happening. It’s a very long process– but we will get there, one cancer at a time!

      Natt

    • Photo: Priya Hari

      Priya Hari answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Hi,

      First of all, let’s not forget that there are now many types of cancers that can be fully cured, which wasn’t possible say 20 years ago.

      One of the problems is similar to what you might have heard with antibiotics. More and more, we are finding that bacteria that could once be killed with a particular antibiotic is now resistant to the bacteria (it can survive), because the bacteria have changed their genes so the antibiotic doesn’t affect them anymore. It is a similar story with some cancers, so the doctor will give the patient a drug which will kill the cancer, but often the cancer will come back but this time the cancer cells have changed their genes so the same drug won’t work for them anymore. This is the difficult bit.

      The other difficult part, is the fact that everyone’s cancer is different. For example, Person A and Person B might both tell you they have skin cancer but the differences in their genes will mean that the same treatment won’t work for both of them. Scientists and doctors are currently working on what is called ‘Personalised Medicine’ which means creating a medicine that will work for that individual based on their genes. This is proving to be quite successful too but as you can imagine it means doing scientific research and experiments for every single cancer patient which can take a very long time and is expensive.

      I think it would be absolutely amazing if someone found a brilliant drug that would cure any and all cancers but since cancer is so complex, it is highly unlikely that this will happen.

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