Question: Is there a cure for cancer?

Liam Taylor answered on 12 Nov 2018:

To help answer your question, I’ll first shed a little light on a project I did a few years ago about how cancer starts. Normally, every cell in your body has a set of instructions to work like an ordinary cell and do its job correctly. Part of these instructions is how to make new cells. A cancer cell doesn’t have these instructions quite correct, so cancer cells grow at an uncontrollable rate. We still don’t really know why this happens.

We can treat cancer very well. There are lots of types of treatment, depending on the type of cancer – including surgery to cut out the bad cells, or ‘chemotherapy’, which puts medicine in your blood to help kill off cells that grow super quickly when they’re not supposed to. Treatment gets better and better and better every day. There are fewer people dying from cancer than ever before.

But ‘cure’ is a tricky one because we don’t really know what causes it yet. We can treat cancer until it goes away, but it might come back. Until we have a solution to stop it coming back, we haven’t really ‘cured’ it. This is what scientists are desperately trying to work out. And they’re getting closer and closer every day. I strongly believe that within the next few years we will have a cure, or have worked out how to make a cure. It will be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the century.