• Question: How close are you to find a cure against cancer?

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      Asked by MelissaMia to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 10 Jun 2016.
      • Photo: Daniela Lobo

        Daniela Lobo answered on 10 Jun 2016:

        Hi, MelissaMiaB 🙂

        Cancer is a very broad medical field – there are many, many people working on finding better prevention tools, better diagnostic methods and better treatments for it. I am not one of them, so I am very far from having the answer, but I know several scientists who are working on it day and night.

      • Photo: Jonathan Hunter

        Jonathan Hunter answered on 10 Jun 2016:

        I’m the same as Daniela, I’m not working in the field so am probably not the best person to answer it either.
        But one of the biggest problems for people trying to cure cancer is that there are hundreds of different forms of cancer and each one acts very differently to the others. A drug which may prevent one type may not be effective against another. Also, there are differences between people. One persons skin cancer may not be the same as the next persons.
        There is a new(ish) branch of medical research called personal medicine (medicines made especially for each patient) which could help with this problem.

      • Photo: Lindsay Robinson

        Lindsay Robinson answered on 11 Jun 2016:

        Cancer is a huge field and each type of cancer can be very different to the next one which makes a “cure” really difficult. Millions of pounds is spent on researching cancer treatment each year and there are always breakthroughs being made. Every time this happens, we learn a bit more.

      • Photo: Danna Gifford

        Danna Gifford answered on 11 Jun 2016:

        It’s very unlikely that there will ever be a single cure for cancer, for two reasons. One, there are many different types of cancer affecting the body in different ways, that require different types of medicine to treat. Two, cancer cells can evolve resistance to cancer medicines, just like bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics. But thankfully, modern medicine is getting better and better at treating each type of cancer all the time.

      • Photo: Juan Ortiz

        Juan Ortiz answered on 11 Jun 2016:

        I wish I could say I am close, but as Daniela, Jonathan, Lindsay and Danna have said; cancer is a huge field where a lot of people are working and there are many types of cancer and this makes difficult for the researchers to find a cure, but humans are amazing and can come up with a solution for almost everything. So I haven’t lost my hope!! 🙂

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