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Asked by CK16 to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 7 Nov 2015.
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Florence McCarthy answered on 7 Nov 2015:
Many cancers are treatable, particularly some leukemias or where the cancer can be surgically removed but of course the majority are discovered too late or have spread to become too difficult to treat. There are huge advancements made every week in cancer research and I am confident that we will be able to manage cancer in the coming years, especially with the advent of personalised medicine. Early detection is also key to survival and screening programmes must be supported.
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Sinead Balgobin answered on 8 Nov 2015:
Some cancers are treatable, and it really depends what you mean. We can use surgery and chemotherapy to get rid of tumors, but sometimes new ones grow because whatever caused the cancer in the first place causes it again. Sometimes the tumors are too aggressive, or the person is too late for those treatments to be successful. Cancer isn’t a single illness either- it covers lots of diseases, from leukemia to breast cancer. I tend to describe cancer as when your cells get a bit broken, and don’t know when to stop growing- so scientists look at ways to fix that, or get rid of the broken cells.
My friend works in biology on a way to treat cancer, in a similar way to how a little girl with leukemia was treated in England. He takes white blood cells (the ones that attack diseases) from healthy people, and then edits the information in the cell to tell it to attack the cancer cells, and not to harm the patient they will be put into. It’s sort of like a personalised treatment. It is very early in its development though, so it will be many years until we find out if it will work!
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Mark Collins answered on 8 Nov 2015:
Yes, very much so! And over the next few years there will be a lot more amazing drugs that will be coming to the hospitals and doctors across the world. I am working on many exciting projects that we feel will make a huge difference to patients and really prolong life as well as eradicate the cancer cells. There are quite a few drugs that are just passing phase III of clinical trials and will soon be going for commercial release and the results observed in early stage are promising to say the least! I also have many colleagues and friends who work with clinical diagnostics, did you know that 98% of diagnosis are not performed by your doctor but are instead by the amazing work of scientists in hospital laboratories who work behind the scenes with blood and other samples. The method of detection are improving for so many cancers so we can detect them earlier, treat them more effectively and this can only be mean one thing, a better possibility of the patient surviving. Is cancer treatable…absolutely! It is very exciting times in laboratories.
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