• Question: Since you know a lot about cancer, please can you tell me how to cure cancer or how it ever formed?

    Asked by Parishi to David, Clare, Arthur on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      This is a tricky question and I know that Tora works on cancer so maybe ask her too,

      Cancer cells are formed when the DNA of an individual cell is damaged. Normally, cells are very good at repairing any damage so generally the DNA has to be damaged in a few places, or, in one of the areas that is required to help fix the DNA. Once the damage has started, the cell can start to multiply and then more and more damage is done, the cells start to grow even faster and then in some cases a tumor is formed.

      As for how to cure it….
      Since the cancer cells grown much more quickly than normal cells, most of the drugs just attack all growing cells but the cancer cells die quicker. The trouble is, these drugs tend to have side effects like being sick and losing your hair. So now, scientists are trying to create drugs which only hurt cancer cells and leave normal cells alone and we have some good ones now. There are some drugs for breast cancer which only kill cancer cells and so are much better. But the research continues to find good drugs for the other types of cancer

    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      If we knew how to cure cancer I’d be out of a job but we do have some really great ideas at the moment it’s just about testing them and finding ways to actually give the treatments in a way that will work. It’s very hard work but we are getting closer to curing it.

      Cancer starts when we get a number of mutations in our DNA (I’m not sure if you know what DNA is yet but it’s sort of a list of instructions for our cells).

      When we get enough mutations added up (They can be caused by things like smoking, sunbathing or even just errors when our cells make a copy) then cancer starts.

      There’s 6 signs that a cell is a cancer cell which are:

      (1) cancer cells grow really quickly
      (2) they ignore signals that might stop their growth
      (3) they won’t die like a normal cell will
      (4) they cause blood vessels to grow towards them (so they can get food and oxygen)
      (5) they can multiply forever
      (6) they invade and spread to distant sites

      Once a cell picks up all of these mutations (plus sometimes even more!) they become cancer

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