• Question: what could you use to cure cancer

    Asked by 578drug26 to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Oliver Charity

      Oliver Charity answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hi 578drug26,

      Cancer is difficult to cure, as it is actually a whole load of different diseases. The progression of it is usually similar, and is split into ‘stages’ 1-4. In essence, cancer has already been ‘cured’, as if you cut out a tumour and stop it spreading, then you’ve potentially ‘cured’ that person. The problem is when cells become so damaged that they lose all the stickyness and start spreading all over the body. At this point, different cancers will have different types of cells. In the future, you might go to the doctor when you have cancer and they will take a bit of it, see what is different about the cancer cells, and give you specially taylored medicine to treat your specific cancer.

      There are many promising treatments in development, some of which used specialised viruses to kill cancer cells, or give the cells back a cancer fighting gene that it has lost!

      Pretty cool stuff.

      Oli

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hi 578drug26,

      As Oli alluded to, one of the problems with curing cancer is how quickly the cells divide. Some of the quickest, such as the HeLa cell line can double in number every 24 hours. This means that even if you could kill 99.9% of the cancer cells, that would still leave lots that can continue to divide, and so the tumor can grow back later on.

      This is also why scientists have to get creative with solutions – I think approaches such as immunotherapy, where the body’s own immune system is reprogrammed to target cancer cells could hold the most promise long term.

      For a true cure, we also need a lot more work on things like understanding the chemical and biological causes of cancer, and new/improved methods for detecting cancers.

      Basically there are many, many different approaches to curing cancer!!

      I hope this helps?

      Steve

    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Hi,

      I’m not a specialist on cancer as my research looks into other diseases. Oli and Steve have given great answers though 🙂

      Hannah

Comments