Question: If we already have Chemotherapy, why are we still searching for cancer cures?

Susanne Muekusch answered on 9 Nov 2012:

Hi jammydodger, that’s a very good question. Although the answer is probably a bit disappointing:
Chemotherapy is one of the standard treatments for all kinds of cancer. Unfortunately, the standard treatments are not enough for two reasons:

First, it is just not working very well in most cases. If a patient suffers from the kind of brain cancer I am working on, he (or she) has only a 50% chance to survive as long as a year after the tumor was discovered. And there are only very very few cases of patients that actually have been cured. I don’t know the actual numbers here but I bet it is less than 10 cured patients per 10,000 that died from brain cancer (whereas “cured” is defined here as “didn’t die from brain cancer and survived for at least 10 years after diagnosis”).

Second, chemotherapy (and other standard therapies) has an awful lot of side effects. It is not just killing the cancer cells, but also normal cells. For example the cells that produce our hairs die. And chemotherapy makes the patients feel sick and nauseous. The problem is that chemotherapy is not a so called “targeted therapy”. A targeted therapy would mean to kill just the cancer cells and leave all the healthy body cells unaffected. Chemotherapy is really more like a sledge hammer, killing every cell that is dividing.
That’s why we still do research: to find something that is more effective and has less side effects. I hope I could convince you?