• Question: When do you reckon the cure for cancer will be found?

    Asked by jimbobz to Pedro, Clare, Mariana, Robert, Susanne on 9 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by guuu, 10normh1, jordonsid.
    • Photo: Pedro Velica

      Pedro Velica answered on 9 Nov 2012:


      Its not that simple, unfortunately.

      Cancer is not just one disease. Breast cancer is very different to stomach or brain cancer, for instance. And even if you think of breast cancer there are many different categories of breast cancers. So you can imagine we are dealing with a good hundred or maybe thousand different diseases.

      What works for one may not work for another so its unlikely that ONE single cure will be discovered the day after tomorrow.

      What is happening (and it has been happening for a few decades) is that we know more and more about this different types of cancers, what causes them, what can we hit to kill them etc. So what you get is that every year you have tiny tiny improvements to the treatments of cancer X, cancer Y or cancer Z and slowly less people die of it or manage to live longer with it.

      And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe when you become a scientist you will find the silver bullet that kills all tumours!!

    • Photo: Robert Insall

      Robert Insall answered on 12 Nov 2012:


      I agree with pedro. There will never be “a cure for cancer” any more than there will be a cure for accidents, or cars breaking down, or central heating failures.

      We can make cancer or these other things less likely, or we can work out ways that cure particular types of cancer, or we can make people with cancer live longer and suffer less. But “cancer” is too big to be a single problem.

      Want to know something really scary? Some tumours have lots of types of cancer in them. Glioblastoma, for example, which is a particularly nasty brain cancer – it can have all sorts of varieties of cancer cell in one tumour. Which is why it’s particularly nasty.

    • Photo: Clare Taylor

      Clare Taylor answered on 13 Nov 2012:


      This is a question that many people ask and one that no-one can answer. Both Pedro and Robert are right – cancer is a complex disease so it is unlikely that anyone will find a cure. What many of us are working towards at the moment are finding ways to slow cancer by stopping the cells from growing, or to help reduce the use of therapies like radiotherapy and chemotherapy which have unpleasant side effects. Hopefully, these will help to prolong life.

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