Question: Why hasn't anyone found a cure for cancer?

Matthew Lee answered on 10 Jun 2017:

Because I don’t think you can find a cure for cancer. The problem is, is that ‘cancer’ is hundreds of different diseases. Cancer means abnormal cell growth, which basically means that a cell has gone wrong and is growing and dividing and growing and dividing without stopping. And as you have about 200 different types of cell in the body that means you can get 200 different types of cancer. But the most difficult part is that every one of those 200 possible cancers will be completely different to someone elses. So for example if you have a cancer of a cell called ‘A’ and so does someone else, although you have the same cancer, the reason you have the cancer is different because each cancer is caused by a different set of mutations. So if 100 people have cancer ‘A’ they will all be similar but only some of them will be treated the same, the others will have to have special treatments that are targeted at their specific cancer – this is called personalised medicine (google it!).

In short, you can’t cure cancer because every cell in your body has the ability to become a cancer, but the chances of that happening aren’t huge and the medicine we have now is getting much much better so if you ever did get cancer the likelihood is that you wont die of it.