Question: have you found any possible ways that could cure all cancers?

Greg Melia answered on 8 Mar 2016:

I wish!

I don’t work on curing cancer as such, I work on detecting it – which still has an important effect on cures, as the earlier we can detect that people have cancer, the easier it is to cure them.

There is no single ‘cure for cancer’ because cancer isn’t just one disease: there area all sorts of different cancers, like breast cancer, leukaemia, prostate cancer and so on.

We have three main types of treatment for cancer: the first is surgery, so just cutting it out. This isn’t always possible, as lots of cancers spread to different parts of the body so we can’t get it all out. The others are chemotherapy, which is treatment with drugs) and radiotherapy, which is treatment with high energy radiation. The radiation actually damages healthy cells as well, but cancer cells are more delicate than normal cells, so it damages them faster and kills the cancer cells while still leaving (most of) the normal cells alive. I did once spend a bit of time working on hyperthermia, which is an experimental treatment where we use guided microwave beams to heat up the cancers before radiotherapy, which makes them more sensitive to the radiotherapy. So I suppose in a way, I have worked on a cure for cancer before, but just for a little bit.