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Asked by ilovenerds to Naomi, Shane, Eileen, Andrew, Aggelos on 12 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by ivan, gracerossiter.
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Naomi Elster answered on 12 Nov 2012:
I am not sure if we will ever get a definite “cure” for cancer. First of all, cancer is not one disease. There are hundreds of different cancers in different parts of the body, and helped to grow by different chemicals, and all of these cancers behave so differently that we can’t use a single drug to treat them all. In fact, one of the reasons that the first cancer medicines were so unpleasant for patients is that we didn’t know enough about how cancer cells were different to normal cells to design drugs specially for cancer. We had drugs designed to attack cells that grew very fast and while this did kill cancer cells, it also wiped out other cells in the body that grow very fast, like cells in our hair, and immune system. Now that we know more about cancer we can make drugs which will attack cancer and leave our normal cells alone, which is better and safer for patients. But there will be no one cure for cancer because cancers are all so different.
Cancer is also a very clever disease. A lot of cancers can learn to avoid being killed by drugs so that after a while, the drugs stop working, even if they worked really well at first. This is called resistance and this is what I am researching. This is another reason I don’t think we will get a “cure.” But that is not to say that I think things will not get better. I really do think it will.
What I think will happen within the next six years is that we will have more options to treat cancer with, and that these new treatments will be safer and more pleasant for patients than the treatments we have now. I also know that we will understand how cancer cells become resistant a lot better by then, so that if a cancer becomes resistant to one treatment we can switch to another that will work better. What all of this means is that we won’t cure cancer in the sense of making it go away for good, but eventually it will be a disease more like diabetes or asthma, that we can manage so that cancer patients can still live normal, long and happy lives, and “the C word” won’t be a thing to be frightened of anymore. We’ve seen such fantastic improvements in cancer treatment already that I know this is possible.
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Eileen Diskin answered on 14 Nov 2012:
What I’m doing in my research is not really trying to find a ‘cure’, but trying to find links between environmental health and human health. There are lots of bad bacteria and diseases that can live in water, and I’m trying to figure out ways to monitor this – so we can easily predict if a body of water, like a lake or a river, might cause diseases in people.
This is a really big problem in countries like Kenya, where people don’t always have access to clean drinking water.
What I am hoping is that if I can figure out an easy way to predict the problem, we’ll be able to have solutions forever.
And yes, I think I should be able to figure all of this out – or at least make a lot of progress – in the next 6 years 🙂
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