Question: when will scientists find a cure for cancer?

Gina Tse answered on 15 Nov 2012:

Hi, this is a very good question. A question I get asked this a lot!

Unfortunately this is a very difficult question to answer because cancer is a very complicated disease. Although we call it cancer, there are actually hundreds of different types of cancers.
Scientists and doctors have found that although you can get patients with the same type of cancer, they might not respond to the same medicines and treatment. This is because every person is unique and different, thanks to our DNA – this is why no-one looks the same – unless you’re a twin but that explanation is for another time!
Cancer is caused when our DNA goes wrong, and starts telling our cells to grow more and faster, this makes a tumour.
Imagine our entire DNA as great big library absolutely full of books, each book is a gene, and each word in the book is one single piece of DNA. When cancer happens, think of it as one of the words in a book being changed; an extra word or something is deleted.
And to “cure” this cancer, you have to find the book out of the whole library, find the right page, find the correct word and fix it. Imagine each person has their one unique library with a completely different set of books and stories written in different ways. You can imagine it being pretty hard to find, bit like a needle in a haystack! This is the challenge us researchers have to face when tackling cancer.

What we are trying to do is to understand our DNA and cancer more, this will help us try and find ways to stop it. Sadly it won’t happen overnight. New cancers are being found everyday which doesn’t help matters, but there are many scientists out there working really hard to make the day cancer won’t be a problem will come sooner!
The best thing to do is to ensure we raise lots of money for cancer research so we can speed up the process 🙂