• Question: How far away is there a cure for cancer?

    Asked by 11sofdel to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I don’t think people will ever cure cancer. But I think we will get better at preventing it and treating it.

      Cancer arises from random errors in the way cells grow. To have a foolproof way of getting rid of this would be really, really hard.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Which one. Sadly there are many kinds of cancers and generally they vary from case to case. Cancer is caused by damage to your DNA leading cells to grow out of control and do funny things. By looking at the DNA from many different kind of cancers we are starting to understand which particular genes (the parts of DNA that code proteins that control how a cell works) are important in thi process.

      I know that there is a large project at the moment called the Cancer genomics project trying to collect together datasets from many different cancers, not just different cancers but th same cancer types from different patients. One thing they learned is that cancer cells are a mess, one that I saw had 77 chromosomes (human cells normally have 23 pairs).

      To really cure cancer I think we would need to develop a system of personalised medecine, which we are a long way off, or make DNA invincible, which has other problems.

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Another issue, rather than cure (very hard) and prevention (our best case) is early detection. The earlier you get diagnosed, the easier it is to treat a cancer, but a lot of times by the time cancer is detected, it’s already been there for years.

      One problem is lack of symptoms, which is hard to do anything about, but the other issue is imaging things inside the body. If we improve our ability to spot things like tumours smaller and smaller, we’d be able to treat the cancer easier, and hopefully prevent it travelling around the body.

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