• Question: Are the cures for most cancers the same or different?

    Asked by hazel.com to Sudhin, Sergio, Katie, Frances, Diarmuid, Aoife on 9 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Diarmuid Kenny

      Diarmuid Kenny answered on 9 Nov 2019:

      All cancers are different. The reasons that they start is different, how they respond to drugs is differnt.. We need to make specific drugs for specific cancers. This is part of the challenge

    • Photo: Aoife Campbell

      Aoife Campbell answered on 9 Nov 2019:

      Cancer is an extremely complicated disease so usually the treatment is different. Some of them can be similar to each other but generally they require specific drugs

    • Photo: Frances Shiely

      Frances Shiely answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      Now, cancer is not my research area so I’m really not qualified to answer that in detail. But no, new cancer treatments are very specific to the type of cancer that a person has. Though many patients will have chemotherapy, the chemotherapy drugs are different depending on the type of cancer you have. So lung cancer treatment is different to bladder cancer, for example.

    • Photo: Katie Fala

      Katie Fala answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I don’t work on cancer, but as the others answered already cancers seem to act very differently based on the type of cancer cell and where in the body it affects. My understanding is that most of the chemotherapy or radiotherapy treatments affect all cells but are targeted to kill the cancer cells more than the cells of the rest of the body. There seem to be new interesting immunotherapies in development/trials that are more targeted, which would hopefully have less side effects for the patient.

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