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Asked by harryboulton to Roy, Rowena, Nicola, Kieren, Kate on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by lozzasciencekid.
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Kate Nicholson answered on 13 Mar 2014:
We can cure some types of cancer, but not all of them 🙁 we are working toward that but I think it is still some years away yet. It scares me a bit because breast cancer runs in my family and my mam died of it 5 years ago, and that’s one of the cancers that we can usually treat quite well.
There are some types of cancer that are quite tricky to cure because of how they grow, and we still need to work on how to get enough of the drugs to them without damaging the healthy cells too much.
Why not ask some of the scientists in cancer zone? They will know far more than I do.
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Nicola Rogers answered on 13 Mar 2014:
killing cancer cells is not the problem – this is quite easy in fact – but killing ONLY the cancer cells and not damaging healthy cells is the difficulty. In addition, detecting cancer cells in the body before the cancer as spread is the other challenge – these are the two challenges for being able to cure cancer, and there is a lot of money being put in to cancer research these two problems. Once we know where the cells are and how to selectively target them then it is curable
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Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 14 Mar 2014:
There are a lot of cancers you live with but don’t kill you; you just have to manage them like other illnesses. Whilst curing cancer may be a long way off it may be more doable to confine cancers to stop them growing and make more of them just illnesses to manage. I don’t follow cancer research though because I find animal testing controversial even as a “lesser evil” in medicine so I don’t support medical charities (or oppose them) like cancer research.
One reassuring thing I can say is that breast cancer gets talked about far too much, so people think the risk is much much bigger than it is. Oppositely lung cancer from smoking is played down and a lot of smokers underestimate their risk).
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