Related Questions
- if you could cure any disease what would you cure (if cancer it has to be a specific part i.e lung etc
- Is pancreatic cancer the only cancer you have researched?
- what is the most painful cancer you can get? what is the most deadly? and what is the most common
- Have you ever came close to a cure of a disease?
- What causes most cancers
By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
One of the reasons is that there is no one cancer. Each cancer is largely unique to that person so its hard to make a treatment that works for everyone.
Another reason is that a cancer is made of the same cells that you are, they just behave differently. If you design a drug to kill cancer cells you are at a very really danger of killing all the other cells in your body. For this reason we need to be very careful.
I’m going to steal an explanation of cancer I wrote on another question,
“All the cells in your body have 4 basic actions – grow, move, change or die. They perform these actions when the body tells them to using chemical signals called cytokines. Cytokines tell a cell to change the way the cell is using its DNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA) and when it does this it does one of those 4 actions I mentioned above.
In a cancer cell the DNA has been damaged enough that the cell can’t respond to the cytokine so it becomes a rouge cell that doesn’t do what the body tells it to.
It gets very complicated here but once a cell stops following instructions from the body it can start to misbehave very badly and we call a cell that stops doing thing the body tells it to do or worse, starts doing things its not supposed to, a cancer cell.”
So you can see a cancer cell is the same as the rest of your cells, only misbehaving.
Having said this the treatments we have now work because they attack the properties of cancer cells rather than the cells themselves. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy both kill fast growing cells and cancer cells tend to grow faster than other cells. Other cells that grow very fast are those that make hair, finger and toe nails and skin which is why cancer patients often have their hair fall out, nails get weaker and skin break easier.
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Hi pnemonoultramicroscopicsillicovolcanoconiosis
Actually, there have been some amazing successes for a number of different cancers. The first thing we need to do is get our head around the fact that cancer is a very “heterogeneous” disease, that is it is very different for different people and that among cancers that effect a single organ, say breast, there are different types of cancers. Let’s stick with breast cancer as an example. Many years ago, the number of women dying from breast cancer was very high. Over the last few decades, as a result of a tremendous amount of cancer research, these numbers have come down significantly and the survival rate for breast cancer sufferers is much, much better. Research into breast cancer has discovered that there are a handful of different sub-types of breast cancer that come about due to different biology of these cancers within these sub-types. Each one has different type of treatment that if diagnosed early enough (regular checks, mammograms, etc.), the person has an excellent chance of being cured. However, there are still unfortunate patients that fall into a very aggressive subgroup that has not got any effective treatments. This is the case for many different types of cancer.
For pancreatic cancer, it is even more heterogeneous and very, very aggressive and there are no real therapies that work well for the patient. Surgery is really only the best option, but most people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed too late and can’t get surgery done. This is why we are trying to understand the biology of pancreatic cancers better and work out all the sub-types of pancreatic cancer so we can work out how best to treat these patients.
Hope this helps….
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This is very well covered by the others
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Hi Pnemo and Tommy,
The others have covered this well, but I just wanted to reinforce that “cancer” isn’t one disease. It really is a blanket term for several conditions in which cells become out of control. Some of them are caused by things like exposure to certain types of radiation or to certain chemicals, some of them can be caused by viruses, some of them are dependent on our own steroid hormones, some of them can be related to our genes, some of them involve several other factors. For some of them, we don’t even really know much about what can cause them.
As Chris and James have said, there have actually been some “cures” for cancer, like chemotherapy and radiation therapy, surgery, and even some specific drugs for specific types of cancer, like Tamoxifen for breast cancer that is dependent on (needs) the steroid hormone oestrogen (which known the female hormone, although males have some, too). Early detection and prevention (by avoiding factors we know can cause cancer, such as smoking) can certainly increase chances of treatments being successful, but the unfortunate part is that cancer is often detected too late, when it can no longer be stopped.
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