Question: do you know the cure for cancer

Elliot Jokl answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Hello, and an excellent question!

I think an important thing to remember is that cancer is not one, single disease. It is a family of hundreds of different diseases which are caused by different things. There can be some common things between different cancers, which is why we call all of these diseases ‘cancer’, but just like members of your own family, individual members can be very different! So not only do you have different types of cancer depending on where in the body they are (like brain cancer, liver cancer etc) but even if two people have cancer in the same place, the biology of the cancer tumour that they get can be very different. This means that there is not going to be one, single cure for all cancers. Rather, scientists are focusing on how they can quickly find out the most information they can about a patient’s tumour and trying to identify the best possible treatment for that. This is known as personalised medicine, adapting the treatment to the individual patient, and I think that is going to be a very exciting area in the next few years and decades.

With some cancers, this can work very well and there are some very good treatments. With other cancers, for example brain cancer, we still don’t have very good treatments and so we need to learn more about how brain cancers work and how best to treat them.

I think there have been some really exciting developments recently in what is called immunotherapy – which is training a person’s immune system to recognise cancer and get rid of it. But like Thomas mentioned, there are lots of different approaches which can be used to treat cancer, and I think developing good combinations of these different treatments is going to be the best shot at getting people cured.