• Question: is there a cure for cancer yet

    Asked by 243utec48 to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 13 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by anonymous.
    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      The good news is that for some cancers, the answer is yes. For example, testicular cancer, skin cancer and leukaemia (cancers in the bone marrow) can be cured using current treatments (like drugs (known as chemotherapy), radiotherapy (zapping the tumour with radiation) and surgery (ie cutting out the cancer from a person)), as can 75% of breast cancers (here’s a good website: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancers-in-general/cancer-questions/can-cancer-be-cured).

      However, there are still a lot of cancers that we can’t cure, but we are doing better – survival from cancer has doubled in the UK in the last 40 years, and half of the people who are treated for cancer now live for at least 10 years after they begin their treatment.

      So we’re getting there, but there is still a long way to go before we can say that all cancer can be cured. Here’s a really good blog post about some myths about cancer and cancer cures:http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2014/03/24/dont-believe-the-hype-10-persistent-cancer-myths-debunked/

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hiya, to add some fluff to Paul’s awesome answer:
      I’m no expert on this at all, but from what I understand, we’ve been making a lot of progress answering two big questions about different cancers: How do the cancer cells multiply, and why does the immune system not recognize and kill them? The better we address those two questions the more we’ll have a chance at creating real cures for different cancers.
      Basically, cancer cells are just normal body cells that have gone crazy and started multiplying pointlessly. The funny thing is, our immune system is generally really good at recognizing ‘crazy’ cells and killing them. Our body probably kills a few thousand cancer cells every day. No big deal. So why do some of those cells escape capture and start growing into big colonies (i.e. tumors)? And how can we awaken the immune system to start fighting them? It seems that if we understand that better, we may be able to get a sort of vaccine against some forms of cancer.
      The second question is: How do cancer cells multiply, and is that somehow different from how normal cells multiply? For example, the reason why radiation therapy works is because radiation only kills cells WHILE they are multiplying. And because cancer cells multiply MORE OFTEN than normal cells, radiation also kills a lot more cancer cells than normal cells. That’s obviously still a pretty rough way of trying to kill specifically cancer cells. So, people are now trying to find e.g. certain molecules that only cancer cells, but not normal cells, use in order to grow. If we find such specific molecules, we could send a ‘twisted’ version of those molecules through the body, which would be taken up only by cancer cells and destroy their structure.
      Some of these ideas already work on cancer cells grown in the lab, but as I understand it we’re still a while away from being able to use them safely in people.

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