What is the most realistic cure/ solution for cancer?

Algernon Bloom answered on 16 May 2022:

It depends on the type of cancer really.
Some types (like breast cancer) surgery are a very good choice but this does not work for blood cancer.
I think personalised medicine is the most realistic cure. This is where you identify the best general method of treatment the personalise it for the specific patient.

Karin Purshouse answered on 17 May 2022:

Great question, tough to answer! Tough because the more I learn about cancer, both in the lab and in the clinic, the more I see cancer as being like lots of different illnesses. For example, we now treat cancers with all kinds of different treatments – not just surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but also immunotherapy, targeted therapy, hormone therapies etc. Different things work for different cancers because the biology between them is so variable.
So I think an aspiration is that rather than a cure, we aim for long term control – like any chronic disease. I think our best chance of that is finding ways to understand as much of the biology about a patient’s cancer as possible so you can give the most specific treatments. Research aims to make our approaches to each part of that better.

Jocelyn Bisson answered on 17 May 2022:

There will be many scientists who have different answers for this! For me I think finding better ways to detect cancer at an early stage is really important (especially for pancreatic cancer which is usually only detected when it is very advanced). If we find cancer earlier in the disease process we have more options in terms of treatments before it spreads. There are many promising options now emerging for early detection such as blood tests to find cancer DNA.

Chelsea Gerada answered on 17 May 2022:

Honestly, there will probably never be a single cure for every kind of cancer. This is because different cancers have different features and even within the same tumour there can be different kinds of cells that respond different to different therapies. You can almost imagine it like a jar of coloured marbles, even though a particular therapy might eliminate the blue marbles you still have green, yellow and red marbles left that require a different strategy.

So for me I think coming up with indicators to predict what patients will respond to different therapies is important. That way we can personalise therapy and make sure we are using different combinations of therapies to eliminate all the marbles rather than just one colour. Hopefully this way the cancer has minimal chance of coming back.

Annabel Black answered on 17 May 2022:

Because each type of cancer is so different and even people with the same type of cancer can end up with very different tumours it’s almost impossible to cure everybody’s cancer with the same treatment. However lots of scientists and medical doctors say we are in the ‘age of personalised medicine’. This means that because the technology and tools we have to study cancer are advancing, the treatments that we can make are becoming more and more specific to each person with cancer. In the future we might even be able to offer each person with cancer a medicine specific to them and to their tumour! There’s still a way to go before this point but science and technology are progressing faster and faster which will help more and more people with cancer.

Erminia Romano answered on 19 May 2022:

This is a very though question. There is not a unique cure. Every cancer type is different and even the same cancer behaves differently among different people. Ideally, every single patient should be “studied” and treated based on its unique cancer features.

Tamir Chandra answered on 20 May 2022:

Hi Jack,

As others have pointed out, there will likely not be a silver bullet for cancer in the near future (but you never know), and many labs now focus on one type of cancer rather than taking a pan-cancer approach. Efforts in detecting cancer early and immunotherapies are, in my opinion, the things that will change outcomes for patients in the near future.

Good luck,
Tamir

Sophie Richardson answered on 20 May 2022:

The most realistic cure at the moment is personalised medicine. Personalised medicine can happen when doctors take all the information about a patient’s cancer and use it to decide the best treatment for every patient individually. This includes information on where the cancer is in the body, what type of cancer it is, and what genetic changes the cancer has. For some people, there might not be a treatment for their specific case, so that’s why scientists are still researching new treatments for cancer.

Some solutions for cancer that are being researched a lot at the moment are early detection and prevention. If you never have cancer, you will never need cancer treatment in the first place. This is done through finding the causes of cancer and helping the public to understand these factors, like encouraging people to stop smoking. Unfortunately, some cancers happen even when we don’t live unhealthy lifestyles. In these cases, finding the cancers as early as possible means there is a better chance of treating the cancer.

In short, there isn’t one solution here! Lots of different research topics and approaches will need to be explored so we can help people with cancer.

Maria Peiris Pages answered on 25 May 2022:

Cancer cells are very resilient and versatile, which means that they adapt very well to change. That also means that they always find a way to escape death, survive anti-cancer treatments and re-grow. The more our research finds out about these ways or mechanisms that cancer cells use to evade anti-cancer drugs, the more we will find new therapies. That means that it is very unlikely that we will find one unique drug that cures cancer, but rather we will use many drugs that attack different features of cancer cells. Thus, I think the most realistic scenario is that we will be able to keep cancer at bay and avoid that these tumour cells grow back without control but it will be extremely difficult to make them completely disappear

Rachel Harris answered on 1 Jun 2022: last edited 1 Jun 2022 1:09 pm

The thing to understand about cancer is that all cancers are different so there will never be one single cure. The best cure would be surgery, but this isn’t possible for everyone – sometimes cancer is good at making it tricky to spot, or growing in places we can’t access with a knife. We’re working hard to come up with lots of different treatments, which might all work together in a special combination depending on each patient.

Ryan Devlin answered on 4 Jun 2022:

Like some other people have said, it really depends on the cancer. In terms of curing cancer outright, I doubt that there ever will be that one all-encompassing cure, particularly since cancer is a bi-product of evolution. Cancer is the result of mutations that happen within our DNA, and unless they are spurred on by smoking, drinking, UV light, etc, these mutations are a completely normal part of our body’s functions.

One key thing that will help us to cure cancer, however, is early diagnosis to make sure that we can cure the cancer early. That, and ensuring that the time from diagnosis to treatment is as short as possible. Finally, as scientists, we always need to keep the patient in mind when looking to cure cancer. There are some cures that scientists discover that cure cancer, but the side-effects would be too harmful to the patient. So, scientists need to keep the patient in mind, and have that endpoint of treating them in mind to ensure that they are safe.

Question: What is the most realistic cure/ solution for cancer?

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