• Question: Will cancer be cure by pills, injections or operations. I know that bone and prostite cancer can be cured as it is quite common.

    Asked by Orla Graham :-) to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      It depends completely on the type of cancer,

      Breast cancer can be cured by surgery while some types of leukemia can be cured chemotherapy or bone marrow transplant. But doctors don’t like to talk about cures too much, no matter what type of treatment there is always a chance the cancer can come back which is why the best treatments are things that stop you getting cancer in the first place, like the HPV vaccine.

    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Like Clare said it’s totally dependent on the cancer itself.

      Most scientists don’t think that there will ever be one cure for all cancers but it’s more likely to be different for every person (called personalised medicine) which is a little more expensive but will work much better.

      The best cancers to get (if that’s not a horrible thing to say) are the ones that you can see or feel like breast cancer or skin cancer because they can be spotted really early and we can normally just chop off the bad area without having to worry about it having spread so much… that’s why cancers that are inside us like on your pancreas or stomach or guts are much much harder to cure because we only spot them once they’ve got pretty bad and you’re right the rarer cancers are much harder to cure because it’s much harder to study them.

      Cures like chemotherapy and radiotherapy often work really well but if they don’t they leave cancer cells that are really hard to kill.

      The more cures we come up with the better we understand cancer and the better chance we have of creating an even better cure.

      I think the best shot will be a combination of approaches like injections and operations

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Hi there,
      As the others have said, I think it will always be a combination of approaches. My Dad died of lung cancer as a result of asbestos poisoning. He had chemotherapy and radiotherapy and they both worked for a while. there as the option of surgery but the chances of success were really low so he decided not to have that.

      The trouble is cancer cells that are really hard to kill, especially those that are in complicated places and it can spread quickly too…. and needs to be treated differently dependent on where it is!

      I think longer term the best hope is for personalised medicine that is tailored to your own DNA, that is programmed to identify and destroy cancer cells at the DNA level. But this is still a long way off.

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