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Asked by akinfenwa to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 15 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by dfeakins.
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Tom Branson answered on 15 Mar 2013:
I hope so! There are currently many drugs and therapies that can prevent or fight against many different types of cancer. And cancer research is one of the biggest areas of science, so there are many many people trying to find new cures. There are however lots of different types of cancer and in different parts of the body, so they each might need a specific drug which is a lot more work for the scientists.
If you feel strongly about it, you should become a scientist and help in the fight against cancer and other diseases.
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Jack Heal answered on 15 Mar 2013:
The problem with getting a “cure for cancer” is that there are many different types of cancer and so it’s a bit like wanting a single cure for all viral infections – which includes everything from AIDS to the common cold.
Cancer is when cells forget how to die. Chemicals which stop the cancer from dying are not made for some reason, or alternatively too many chemicals which stop the cell from dying are made and so the cells stop dying. If lots of cells stop dying then you get a large build-up of cells, which is a tumour. In some cases the tumour spread and causes enormous damage.The many different types of cancer can have different effects on the body. The chances of survival are different depending on the type and location of the cancer. For example, changes of surviving testicular cancer are high, but chances of surviving pancreatic cancer are very low.
There are ways to treat cancer such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and these can improve chances of survival, and keep the patient alive for longer. These treatments are improving all the time, and are always helped by things like early diagnosis.
When a new drug is developed to treat cancer it requires lots of testing to make sure it’s safe and that people know exactly when to use the drug and what the risks and side-effects are. From start to finish, drug development takes years.
So although things are improving, it is slow going. I don’t think that there will ever be a single drug which cures all cancers. However, I think that we may well arrive at the position where cancer is curable in the early-middle stages and survival rates will become high for all cancers. This scenario would be effectively a “cure for cancer”. I think it will be a long time before this happens, but as I said: things are improving all the time.
The more people who take an active interest in developing cancer cures the better. With your help we may get there 🙂 There aren’t many more worthy fights to get involved in!
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Yalda Javadi answered on 15 Mar 2013:
I hope so 🙂
We have made so much progress in the last decade, especially developments with how cancers are imaged, so people can be screened and diagnosed early enough. Many cancers now, if recognized early enough, can be targeted and killed, so more and more people are surviving cancers.
There is still quite a road ahead of us though, before all cancers are cured. The main trouble is that not only are there so many different types of cancers, there are so many sub-types within that cancer, which makes treating them so complicated.
But with continuing financial support and determination, hopefully scientists will get there sooner rather than later 🙂 I’m doing my little bit for cancer research by running a marathon! 🙂
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anon answered on 17 Mar 2013:
Wouldn’t that be great? The big chellenge in curing cancer is that it’s a big disease – and the different types of cancers (brain, lung, breast, prostate, testicular, blood…etc) can occur for different underlying reasons. It’s only once we can understand how they each work, that we can figure out how to cure them – and that takes a LOT of research.
There are some cancer though that you might be able to be vaccinated against in the future. At the moment, girls can be vaccinated against a particular virus that causes cervical cancer, and there are vaccines in development for prostate cancer too. Preventing cancer would be even better than trying to cure it, I reckon.
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Jon Marles-Wright answered on 17 Mar 2013:
I hope we do eventually. I think getting there is going to be very hard and expensive though.
As the others have said cancer isn’t just one disease, it is caused lots of different changes to cells that make them forget to die. So the big thing for curing cancer will be when we can sequence the DNA of each type of cancer cell and in each patient, so that we can see exactly what has gone wrong with the cells that is causing them to be cancerous. If we know what’s gone wrong, then hopefully we can use the exact drugs/therapy to kill just the cancer cells.
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