do you thing it is possible to cure cancer?

Question: do you thing it is possible to cure cancer?
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Asked by xX_OldmanBamanaboni_Xx to John, Laura, Luke, Rob, Ruth on 13 Jun 2016.
- Laura Finney answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  I think maybe we will one day but it will be one cancer at a time. They don’t all work in the same way and cancer is a word used to describe many different forms of the disease.
  
  What cures one of the cancers may not cure another and so it will be multiple treatments I think. Also what works for you might not work for me so it will not be a one-size-fits-all treatment. I do hope that one day we can cure it though! ?
- Robert Williams answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  Yes – but it will take a lot of time and effort.
- John Fossey answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  Cancer is not one disease
  There are many diseases that come under that umbrella.
  
  There are already fantastic cures for some cancers, testicular cancer and breast cancer survival rates are dramatically improving due to improved therapies and better early detection.
  
  We urgently need better early detection
  
  Just take a look here to see al the new drugs recieving FDA approval – all of these come from better scientific understanding and methods
  http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/InformationOnDrugs/ApprovedDrugs/ucm279174.htm
  
  We will always need the brightest people to work on understanding and treating diseases
  
  Excitingly an era of personal medicine, ie drugs tuned to your genetics, is just around the corner – it could be the case that within a generation we may witness profiling to find the most effective drugs with the least side effects
- Luke Williams answered on 13 Jun 2016:
  
  I don’t think it will be possible to cure cancer. The reason is that as others have mentioned above there are various different diseases, even when they are all called “breast cancer” or what have you.
  
  The way I see it, cancer is literally “something going wrong” with as few as one cell. The cell should die, due to this error, but it doesn’t. This cell then divides and divides, and you have a tumour. I don’t see how it would be possible to create a series of treatments to cover every possible eventuality of something going wrong with the thousands of genes.
  
  The only possible way I can see that happening is a particularly sophisticated form of personalised medicine as John has mentioned. The key would be rapid detection and sorting through all the different permutations – I just don’t see this happening.
- Ruth Patchett answered on 14 Jun 2016:
  
  We do already cure a lot of cancers pretty well which I am very pleased about! As the others said there are lots of different types of cancers so it would be pretty tough to cure all types of cancer but we can get better at learning with causes cancers so people can be informed on lifestyle choices (like wearing sunscreen and cutting down on smoking and alcohol consumption) and how to detect it early or we can look at peoples DNA to check if they have genes that make them more likely to get certain types of cancers. So while I am not sure we will be able to cure all types of cancer maybe we can prevent some cases from occurring or spot them earlier to help keep people healthier for longer.

Question: do you thing it is possible to cure cancer?

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