Question: How do you cure cancer ?

Jimi Wills answered on 11 Mar 2016:

It depends on what type of cancer.

Cancer is cells that are growing out of control (by growing we mean that they are making loads more cells). The easiest way to cure it is to remove those cells (the tumour). But often the cells start spreading around or they are in a place that’s too difficult to operate on. So then we have a few options.

We can use chemotherapy, which kills growing cells, but not cells that are not growing. Cells in your gut are growing a lot, as are cells in your hair follicles. And that is why chemotherapy makes you feel sick and your hair falls out. It also stops other important cells from growing, like blood cells! It’s not a nice therapy, but it can be very effective.

Radiotherapy can also be very good. Radiation is targeted at the tumour and can kill the cells to they no longer grow out of control. But it doesn’t work if there isn’t enough oxygen. And in the middle of a tumour, there’s often not enough oxygen, so this doesn’t alway work.

So scientists are looking for other ways to fight cancer. Cancer cells are different from normal cells, and there are some common adaptations that help them to grow quicker and out of control. So we try to target those adaptations with drug, because these drugs (hopefully) won’t hurt the normal cells, and so the patient won’t suffer the same way they do with traditional chemotherapy.

But there are so many adaptations, and anyway cancers evolve so the can become resistant to the drug. That’s why cancer is so difficult to fight.

There will (probably) never be a single cure, because all cancers are so different.