Question: have you come close to finding a cure for a disease/ illness yet?

Sharon Sneddon answered on 15 Mar 2010:

Finding cures for illnesss and diseases takes a long time sadly. The work I am doing at the moment is looking really promising for the treatment of 2 diseases, one is breast cancer and the other is to help people who are having problems in getting pregnant. We have discovered that very early embryos need certain genes to be “switched” on at an exact time in order for a baby to properly develop and this is going to help people who are going currently undergoing IVF treatment (if you are not sure what that is, ask me that in another question!!)
With breast cancer, sadly, some peoples cancer can spread around their body. If that happens, the cancer is more difficult to treat. I am looking at a protein that is usually found in your eye and doing experiments to see if it can prevent the cancer cells from spreading. Hopefully these experiments can be carried out in people to see how effective they are so fingers crossed, my work will be used in helping these people in the next 5 years! This might seem like a long time, but all new treatments need to be tested again and again to make sure they are safe and that they do actually work!