Question: How long do you think it will take to beat cancer ?

Greg Melia answered on 7 Mar 2016:

That’s actually a really complicated question! Cancer isn’t just one disease, there are all sorts of different types of cancer. We can beat one, but another one will appear from somewhere.

We can treat many types of cancer, but we usually need to catch them before it’s too late and they’ve grown beyond the point that we can manage. If you can’t see a cancer from the surface of someone’s body, we often don’t detect it until it starts causing the person other problems, which means that it’s already grown quite a lot. So one solution is to find quick, cost-effective and safe ways of scanning people for cancers, so that we can do that regularly and pick up cancers before they grow. It’s that sort of scanning that I’m working on right now.