Question: HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE A CURE FOR CANCER?

Isabel Pires answered on 14 Mar 2015:

Did you know that cancer is not one disease but actually a lot of different diseases? And that even one type of cancer, such as breast cancer for example, is composed of many different sub types depending on how the cancer cells behave, what changes they have and how the tumour looks like under the microscope? Even a single tumour in a specific patient does not look all the same if you were to take a cross section of it… the cancer cells within it are not all the same and might be more or less aggressive, grow slower or faster, and have more or less stronger ability to move and spread.

This means that a single cure for cancer is very unlikely. What scientists and doctors are aiming for we call a personalised medicine treatment. In one of these, we could analyse the tumour of a patient (or similar group of patients) and design a treatment specific for them, which takes into account all the specific differences I was talking about earlier. Treatments can change to adapt to the way that the cancer adapts to it.

The problem with cancer, especially in older people, is that cancer is a consequence of normal working of our cels going wrong, and this is much more likely to happen when people get older, since things will start going wrong more often. The ultimate aim in cancer medicine is then to treat cancer in younger people, and make it a chronic disease, controllable, in older people (such as we already do for diabetes, for example).