• Question: are there any incurable cancers?

    Asked by anon-227008 to William, Thibaut "Tibo", Harry, Georgia, Emily, Aimee on 15 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Georgia Orton

      Georgia Orton answered on 15 Nov 2019:

      To cure cancer have to kill the bad cells and leave the good ones. This is tricky because cancer cells look very very similar to healthy cells. Because of this the drugs we use to treat cancer also kill some healthy cells which can make people ill. Also, every cancer is different – lots of things can go wrong in breast cells to cause breast cancer and each one might need a different medication. All this means that some people do get cancer which cannot be cured currently. Lots of scientists are trying to make medicines which are specially designed only to go to the bad cells, so hopefully cancer survival rates will continue to improve.

    • Photo: Aimee Egglestone

      Aimee Egglestone answered on 15 Nov 2019:

      As Georgia said most of the current Cancer treatments struggle to tell the difference between Healthy and Cancerous cells and that can be a huge problem.

      For the most part there are 3 main routes in current cancer treatment.
      1. Surgery to remove the cancer – specific location, sometimes hard to get at internal organs like the pancreas
      2. Radiation Treatment – non-specifc location, radiates all your cells and can damage healthy ones, can struggle to reach internal organs.
      3. Chemical Treament, Chemotherapy/drugs – non-specific, generally kill healthy and unhealthy cells ibut cancer cells are greedier and end up taking a slightly higher dose.

      So the issue comes when surgery isn’t going to work and the doses of radiation/chemical treatment would be too high to be safe. All cancer is “curable” it just isn’t safely curable at the moment, which is one of the reasons I really want to go into this field!

    • Photo: Thibaut Deviese

      Thibaut Deviese answered on 16 Nov 2019:

      Yes, there are incurable cancers. They are called terminal cancers. This means no treatment will eliminate the cancer. But there are many treatments that can help make someone as comfortable as possible. This often involves minimizing the side effects of both the cancer and any medications being used.

    • Photo: Emily Sparkes

      Emily Sparkes answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      Adding on to what Aimee said, lots of chemotherapy drugs work by tageting fast-growing cells. This is because cancer cells multiply at a rate much higher than normal cells. This is the reason that people often lose their hair when having chemo- because your hair and nails and fast growing

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