Question: Do you think we can cure cancer by editing it’s DNA?

Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

Wow Ana, that’s an interesting thought. I guess that depends very much on the type of cancer because if it is a solid tumour, a lump, then it is probaly easier to just remove it… which of course will depend on where it is. On the other hand, if it is something like leukaemia or cancer of the blood, then indeed manipulation is a very attractive option. The reason for this is that the cells of the blood keep renewing themselves and proliferating so a malignancy will very quickly spread among all of them which makes it very difficult to treat. The only option at the moment is to irradiate the person to destroy all the blood cells, including the stem cells in the bone marrow that originate all of them and then transplant bone marrow from a healthy person taht matches the patient immunologically. The stem cells from the bone marrow of the donor repopulate the patient’s bone marrow and generate all the blood cells which will then be healthy. However the patient will need immunosuppressant therapy and that is very hard. So If we knew what the fault is in the cancerous cells and we could correct the mistake using DNA editing technology, then we could do this in the stem cells from the bone marrow and then put the patient’s own corrected cells back. This would cure the disease without the need of any further therapy, at least in theory. In fact it has been shown that this works in the case of other type of blood diseases.