• Question: When do you think that the cure for cancer will be found?

    Asked by anon-292590 on 20 Apr 2021.
    • Photo: Steve Briddon

      Steve Briddon answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      Hi Abi,

      Cancer isn’t my specialist area – so I’m sure another scientist will be along in a bit with a more detailed answer. However, I do know we’ve come a long way and there are lots of cancers we CAN cure, and we are getting better at it all the time.

      Cancer isn’t one disease – there are about 250 different sorts of cancers – all of which are caused by cells carrying on growing when they shouldn’t. Some of these we can treat really well, others are more difficult. I don’t think it’s likely we will get one drug or treatment which works for ALL cancers, but we are finding more and more specific ones that work for each of the different types.

      We are learning more about why cells go wrong in cancer all the time, particularly what is in our genes (DNA) that makes this happen. This is allowing us to find better, more specific and effective drugs that only kill the cancer cells that have gone wrong. So I think it’s going to be cured a bit at a time – but we will keep making new discoveries quickly!

    • Photo: Kip Heath

      Kip Heath answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      The term cancer covers a huge range of conditions and there are many different causes. Each is so different that with our current scientific knowledge I can’t imagine a single cure for all cancer. But we make progress all the time – for example when I was younger the HPV vaccine was not available, but that has a massive impact on cervical cancer rates.

    • Photo: Rosie Goodburn

      Rosie Goodburn answered on 20 Apr 2021:

      I agree with what Steve and Kip have said! It’s also worth noting that we are always thinking about how we can improve what we call “screening”, which is where we test people who don’t know they have cancer yet so we can catch it early. For many types of cancer, learning a patient has it earlier on improves our chances of curing them significantly!
      .
      For example, all older women are invited for breast cancer screening, so we can catch breast cancer before any symptoms develop. We do have to think about the best way we can spend our limited money though, and so we make sure to figure out what kind of people will be best to ask to come in for screening – who will be most at risk 🙂

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