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Asked by Ayrton to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 6 Nov 2017.
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Ed Bracey answered on 6 Nov 2017:
Cancer isn’t just one disease.
It’s lots of diseases.
So there will never be just one cure!
Our cells are really complicated machines made up of lots of different parts.
Some of those parts are like complicated brakes that decide how often the cell gets to divide and create new cells.
If one or a few of the parts of those brakes gets broken, the cell starts to divide too often, creating cancerous tumours.
Things can go wrong with lots of different parts of the braking system and each way it goes wrong can lead to a different type of cancer.
Things can also go wrong in different parts of our bodies too, like lung, gut, skin, and each of those can lead to a different type of cancer.
Scientists have managed to find cures for some cancers, for example testicular cancer has a very high survival rate in the UK.
But cancers can be different in all people too!
So that’s why it’s so hard to find a cure!
But scientists think we’ll manage to find a cure for each of them:
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Yo Yehudi answered on 6 Nov 2017:
Edward summed this up pretty nicely – even if we cure one cancer, that cure may not affect other types of cancer at all. This kind of sucks, but there are some definite rays of hope out there. For example, consider the HPV vaccine. It’s amazing that just by getting an injection you can significantly reduce your chances of getting cervical cancer – and this is a pretty recent discovery, too. At the hopefully-not-too-crumbly age of 32 😉 I’m too old to have received the vaccination!
https://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/hpv-human-papillomavirus-vaccine.aspx
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