Question: When do you predict cancer will be cured?

Vicky Forster answered on 10 Nov 2013:

Hello,

This is a very good question, but also a very difficult question to answer. I get asked this quite a lot by friends, family and sometimes people I meet at charity events where we invite people into the labs to see what we are doing.

The most important thing that you need to know, is that cancer is not one single disease, infact there are over 100 different types! Cancer is the word used to describe a disease where division of cells doesn’t stop when it should do causing tumours. Lung cancer for example, is so very different from brain cancer and blood cancer. So, if you take testicular cancer for example – 99% of men survive this type of cancer, so you could say that we have cured testicular cancer already. However, for pancreatic cancer – sadly almost nobody survives at all – so we really need to try and come up with better treatments for this type of cancer. The problem is with treating all cancers the same – is that all drugs work better on some types than the other. At the moment, us scientists are treating different types of cancer with drugs that are particularly designed for that type of cancer – and this appears to be working a lot better than treating all types of cancer with the same drugs (even though they don’t work at all in some cancers).

I wish i could give you a more certain answer for your question – I hope there will be a day when we can say we have cured all cancers, but for now – we have to look at all of the different types of cancer and see where we can make improvements with drugs that are specifically designed for a single type of cancer. Treating them all the same worked up to a certain point – but now we have better ways of looking at what goes wrong in these cancer types, and what makes them different – we can be a bit cleverer about how we try to cure them.