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Asked by 979furk43 to Sarah, Kieran, Kathryn, Joanne, Chris on 7 Nov 2017.
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Joanne Duffy answered on 7 Nov 2017:
Cancer is just when a cell loses control over its ability to reproduce. A cell is able to make a copy of itself using a process called mitosis. When that gets damaged, you get uncontrolled growth of that type of cell, and it leads to a tumor. But every single type of cancer is unique, because every type of cell is different. So someone who has leukaemia, which is a type of cancer in the blood, needs a totally different treatment to someone who has cancer in their brain. At the moment, you’ve probably heard of chemotherapy, which is a type of drug treatment that’s really toxic to cells. It kills cancer cells, but it also kills healthy cells, and even if it gets rid of cancer, it can make people really sick, so it’s not an ideal treatment. If it’s a tumor, a surgeon can try to cut most or all of the tumor out. So because every type of cancer is different, every single treatment has to be different, which is why it’s impossible to find “a cure”.
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Chris Werner answered on 8 Nov 2017:
If it was easy it would have been done by now! Joanne’s covered it very well there because there are so many different types of it, so its not that a particular cancer is difficult to cure (some are like pancreatic cancer, fatal if not caught in time) its that there so many!
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Sarah Guerin answered on 9 Nov 2017:
Cancer is essentially a change in your cells (a bad one), it is difficult to find a way to destroy cancerous cells without damaging the healthy cells in your body too much. Also as the others have said- we will most likely need to find a cure for each type of cancer, instead of just cancer overall.
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