Question: Will there ever be a cure for Cancer

Callum Thomas answered on 22 Mar 2021:

Hi Callum! Thanks for your question. This is a bit of a difficult question to answer. One reason is that “cancer” is actually not just one disease, there are lots and lots of different types of cancer and it can be caused by a range of different things. In general, “cancer” is actually a group of cells in the body that grow continually out of control and which can spread to other parts of the body. Normally the body has controls to stop cells growing out of control by killing them when they reach a certain age or start growing abnormally, but cancerous cells have managed to avoid these in one way or another. This of course gives us a problem: cancer cells are very difficult to kill not only by the body but by other means as well. We can try and cut them out with surgery, kill them with chemicals (chemotherapy) or radiation (radiotherapy). For some types of cancer these treatments work really well and the cancer can be totally removed and won’t come back. So for these types of cancer you can say we already have a kind of cure, for example skin cancer is often “cured” by removing the cancerous skin area and this has a very high success rate. However other types of cancer might be much harder to treat because they might be resistant to chemicals or radiation, or might be in parts of the body that are really difficult to reach or remove completely with surgery. So in the end it is unlikely there will ever be one “cure for cancer” just like there will never be just one “cure for disease”. However we have made a lot of progress in working out the best treatments for different types of cancer, and in working out how to detect cancer early before it can spread throughout the body to give us the best chance of removing it before it spreads too far.