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Asked by zaclandau10 to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 14 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by jacksharp, madeleineh, joeb.
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Stefan Piatek answered on 14 Mar 2013:
Ah tricky one, the really difficult thing about cancer is that it isn’t one disease. Cancer is basically when a cell’s DNA (their blueprint of what to make) gets changed to a point where they want to and can keep on growing forever. The problem here is that there a lot of things that can change in the blueprint to make this happen.
That being said, there are some really interesting new ways of targeting cancer like using nanoparticles or viruses to specifically attack the cancer cells.
I could be wrong here, but there might be a shift to controlling cancer rather than killing it off. The reason I say this is because if you have a great treatment that is 99.99% effective, there might be that 0.01% that can resist it, now you’ve only let this type survive and it’s resistant to your treatment and probably nasty in other ways. The real thing that kills in cancer is it spreading to other parts of your body, so if we can control the asthma but not kill it, that means that the 0.01% won’t be the majority and cancer will possibly be less harmful. I guess if we can stop it from growing and spreading then we would probably save more lives than if we tried to completely get rid of it!
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Jennifer Paxton answered on 14 Mar 2013:
Great question and great answer Stefan. I really don’t know the answer to this…..I certainly hope so!
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Phil Rice answered on 19 Mar 2013:
There are lots of different types of cancer and lost of different cures. take childhood cancers like acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – this is almost always cured; Hodkins lymphoma – curable; Wilm’s tumour (of the kidney – curable). many adult tumours are curable – bowel, cervical for example but the cure rate is heavily influenced by the stage at which the patients presents to their doctor – so NEVER put off suspicious symptoms.
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