Question: Have you got a treatment for lung cancer

Alex Haragan answered on 2 Jun 2018:

Yes there are many treatments for lung cancer!

A lot of older treatments, although still widely used, include things like chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.
All of these have problems – not all cancers can be surgically cut out or have already spread, and both chemotherapy and radiotherapy kill and damage a lot of normal cells.

In recent years we have seen new sorts of drugs. If you imagine some lung cancers have a “switch” that keeps telling them to be cancerous, to keep growing and keep being bad. Some drugs turn these switches off.
Unfortunately not all lung cancers have switches like this, or we don’t have drugs that can switch them off.
And worse cancer is very clever and eventually works out ways to get round this!

The newest drugs (and the ones I worked most closely with) involve getting out immune system to kill the lung cancer (normally our immune system fights infections from bacteria, virus, fungi and so on).
These can work great – but unfortunately these are also not perfect, with many side effects and they don’t work in everyone.

So yes – we have lots of treatments – the trick is to find the best one when someone has lung cancer – and to keep making new ones. I truly believe we can cure cancer with all these new drugs one day!