• Question: How can be cancer cured?

    Asked by Nora900 to Max, Lizzie, Ben on 5 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Lizzie Wright

      Lizzie Wright answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      This is a difficult question because cancer isn’t just one disease. There are so many different types of cancer (lung, breast, liver, etc) and each person’s caner is completely different because it has it’s own mutations, with many tumours containing hundreds of different mutations.

      Current research is looking at more personalised therapies, so not a one-size-fits-all treatment (like chemotherapy is), but one that is tailored to each individual’s cancer cells.

      A really exciting new type of “drug” is called CAR-T, where a patient’s white blood cells are removed and genetically engineered to attack their own cancer cells. The cells are then injected back into the patient. This means we can supercharge our own immune system to fight the cancer in a more efficient way and use fewer harsh treatments like chemotherapy.

      I think this is the future – we will never have a standard cure, but be able to develop specific treatments for each person. The more we learn about how cancer develops and evolves, the better we can treat it.

    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      I agree with Elizabeth’s answer that the immune system can fight cancers.

      Some cancer cells are really devious because their cell surfaces can have ‘messages’ which tell immune cells not to attack them. Some studies have found that if we turn off these messages with specific drugs, our own immune cells can attack the cancer cells with amazing results!

      Therefore I think if we study how our immune systems are influenced by cancer cells then we can develop more therapies like this and be more specific and targeted for each individual patient as Elizabeth suggested.

    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      As Elizabeth and Ben have written, cancer is so difficult to treat because it’s really a collection of different kinds of disease. They all need to be treated in very different ways so coming up with a single cure could be very tough. But using the immune system to find cancer from the inside could be a really great strategy.

      In general, I think the future of cancer medicines will be all about ‘personalised’ medicine. At the moment, almost everyone with the same type of cancer gets the same type of treatment. But imagine if everyone had to wear the same shoe size, no matter how big their feet were! Instead of getting the same medicine as every other cancer patient, personalised medicine means that doctors will measure a patient’s cancer and work out exactly which medicines will help them the most.

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