• Question: what are some cures of cancer you have thought may work?

    Asked by kennedy10 to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      I’m more of a prevention mindset than a cure one. I have heard quite a lot of good things about photodynamic therapy, which uses lasers to target cancer cells in a tumour.

    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      I don’t know anything about curing Cancer, sorry. Some of the others do seem to though…

    • Photo: Philippa Bird

      Philippa Bird answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      There are loads and loads of things being researched.
      If you have read my profile, you will see there is a way of loading drugs into nanoparticles and delivering them just to cancer cells and not healthy cells, which means you can use a higher dose on the cancer without poisoning the body. I think this will definitely be widely used within ten years.
      There are then nanoparticles you can send to the cancer and then put some sort of radiation over the body and heat up the particles and kill the cancer with the heat. That hasn’t been used on humans yet.
      There are some skin cancers which they can inject with a chemical to make them sensitive to light and then shine a light on them.
      There is so much work going on, but the thing we must remember is there will never be one “cure for cancer”, because cancer is actually a collection of lots of diseases which have different characteristics but have the same broad description of rapidly dividing cells out of control. So it might be that each different type of cancer needs a different treatment.

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