• Question: how come cancer hasn't been able to be treated yet, couldn't it be treated by using some form of radiation drugs?

    Asked by 557bsmf22 to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 17 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Elliot Jokl

      Elliot Jokl answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      This is a very good question!

      I think an important thing that people need to realise is that cancer isn’t just one disease, but a family of different diseases. And just like the members of your family have lots of differences, each type of cancer can also be very different. So a treatment that works really well for some kinds of breast cancer might not work at all well for another type of cancer like brain cancer, for example. So we don’t need one cure for cancer, what we need are hundreds of different treatments for hundreds of different types of cancer! This is a very big challenge and so it is not surprising that it takes a very long time.

      Thanks to lots of hardworking scientists (and lots of generous people in the public who donate to cancer research) we do have some treatments that work pretty well for some types of cancers, but there are quite a few cancers where finding good treatments is still difficult.

      There are some exciting new developments recently. Thomas can probably tell you more about radiation, but one of the things I am very excited about is called immunotherapy – which is using a patient’s immune system to fight cancer. Sometimes the immune system struggles to recognise that cancer cells are dangerous, because they can look very similar to the normal cells in your body. Some teams of scientists are figuring out how to train the immune system to fight cancer cells, and there have been some very positive results using this method.

    • Photo: Thomas Biggans

      Thomas Biggans answered on 18 Jun 2016:

      In nuclear medicine we do exactly that, we treat cancer using radioactive drugs.

      At the moment we only have two main treatments, radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer and radioactive radium for bone cancer. Scientists have tested these drugs alot so we know that they will treat the cancer and we can be ready for any side effects and that these side effects won’t make things worse. I think there will be more cancer treatments using radioactive drugs in the future but before we start using them in the hospital they have to be tested and said to be safe to use.

      There are a couple of other radiation based treatments for cancer. Brachytherapy uses radioactive sources that can be placed inside or beside the cancer tumour. These sources are left there for an exact amount of time which the doctor decides before they are removed. Radiotherapy uses x-rays which are fired into the body from the outside. These x-rays are much higher energy than those used for images. Physicists plan how to deliver these x-rays so that most of them hit the tumour.

      Cancer is being treated by these radiation treatments but also by chemotherapy, surgery and more recently immunotherapy which Elliot has described. The problem with all of these treatments is that they can have side effects and they don’t always cure all types of cancer for all people. So in the future of cancer treatment we’re looking at ways to identify which treatment will work best for each patient before we even start treatment.

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