• Question: Will we ever cure cancer?

    Asked by to Edward, Ian, Mathew, Naomi, sakshisharda on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , , , , , , .
    • Photo: Mathew Piasecki

      Mathew Piasecki answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I’d say probably not. The important thing to remember is that cancer has many different forms, although at the basic level there all the same (cells dividing and expanding where we don’t want them to) they’re not all the same. I think that treatments for most types will continue to improve and cures will be found for others, but a cure for all is unlikely.

      The other thing to remember is that cancer can often be described as a disease of ageing, and we’re all living much longer so it’s not surprising if we see an increase in some types of cancer.

    • Photo: Ian Stephenson

      Ian Stephenson answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      As Mathew says, probably not. It’s not as simple as a typical disease, which has a single cause, set of symptoms and some bugs that you need to kill to make it go away.

      With cancer the bad cells are actually the patients own cells, which have been triggered to behave badly for any number of reasons. Some of the most recent research has actually made some progress by considering that every cancer patient has their own unique illness, which requires a unique research effort to treat that one patient.

      We’ll get better at it, but as we figure out how to improve results for some cases, other cases will become more common. Statistically you have to die of something, and as the “easy to treat” diseases get handled better by medical science, the hard ones become more common.

      There’s good evidence that humans are only supposed to live about 30 years. Our bodies are only build to last for a limited time, and we’re currently (generally) using science to beat that by quite a long way, but there will always be a limit,

    • Photo: Naomi Osborne

      Naomi Osborne answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I don’t think we’ll cure cancer either, as Edward and Ian have mentioned, there are just too many causes and all cancers are very different so we’ll never have a single cure.

      I do think we’ll be less afraid of cancer in the near future – half of cancer patients now live at least 10 years because we have better treatment. We’re already stopping people getting some cancers caused by viruses with vaccines and there may be more like this in the future.

      With the more deadly cancers – like cancer of the pancreas – I think we’ll have much better ways of diagnosis and treatment in the future. And it’s all going to be down to future scientists like yourselves.

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