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Asked by 263eura48 to Alex, Ali, Kerry, Philip, Theo on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by minidoodlez, jack.
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Alison Thomson answered on 10 Nov 2014:
I don’t research cancer myself, but the people who do are taking big steps in the effort to cure cancer. I can’t be sure how close they are, but the more we understand how it works, the more likely we are to find a cure!
Luckily these days we already have a whole variety of treatments and ways to make those with cancer more comfortable.
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Alex Pool answered on 10 Nov 2014:
Brilliant question.
As Alison said there are loads of drugs already out there, but unfortunately most of them have loads of side effects, as cancer cells are just our cells that have gone wrong, so a lot of the drugs target normal cells as well as the cancer cells.
There are a lot of researchers all looking at different treatments, so for instance I used to work on a virus that would only kill cancer cells and not normal ones.
My current research looks at how cancer cells divide and how they do that differently to normal cells. If we can understand the differences between the two then we can more efficiently kill just the cancer cells, leaving the normal ones alone.
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