Hi Kirsty 

Interesting article.

You know I have a sneaky feeling that "curing cancer" is a misnomer because the types are so varied that it's not really a single disease.

The most amazing step forward was probably the discovery that the vast majority of cervical cancers are actually caused by a virus and the creation of an innoculation.

This holds out the prospect that we could actually irradicate a form of cancer like smallpox and the way polio could soon go.

Wouldn't that be just incredible?

When we talk about curing cancer it's easy to think about the world as if it were all like the UK - high tech expensive treatments like T-cell based immunotherapy is not going to help someone in a rough part of Rio or downtown Jakata

And it won't help people in the UK if the resulting treatments are marketed at an incredibly high cost and NICE won't fit the bill.

Finding effective treatments is a really important part of the fight but without cheap effective early diagnosis tools and actually getting access to the treatments it won't get us as far as we hope

Hi Graham

Thanks for the reply and, as always, your well thought-out and interesting points. I know that here at Cancer Research UK we are committed to beating cancer through research and we fund research into 200 different types of cancer. But as you say, the types are so varied and it's a very complex disease. 

Early diagnosis is certainly key and that's why we campaign to improve this. 

Best wishes,

Kirsty

Hi Kirsty

While some cancers are totally curable now and many of us have had treatments which have given us a few extra months or years there is a long way to go. We are still in the stone age with our knowledge of molecular biology and the causes of cancer, but each year the great work in research gets nearer to the goal. Meanwhile the most effective action against cancer is to look after your health, 75% of all cancers are preventable. So dont smoke, dont drink alcohol, dont become overweight, dont over-expose your skin to sunlight, excercise well and eat a balanced diet. If you know a recipe for happiness that helps too. Once you have cancer you would gladly follow all the above if you knew it would cure you, but sadly its too late by then. Kim

Where did you get the 75% figure from Kim? Cancer Research say 42%

www.cancerresearchuk.org/.../preventable-cancers

I probably shows how difficult numbers like this can be - for example how do you take into account age? Our bodies have a lot of anti-cancer mechanisms but they get less efficient as we get older which is why cancer rates get higher in older population.

So ironically if we improve other killers like heart disease we'll probably see cancer rates go up!

Not surprising that in the chart on that page how significant smoking is - nearly 20% of preventable cancers.

One of the difficulties for groups like cancer research must be where do you spend the money?

The obvious one is in "heroic medecine" new treatments often hugely expensive and often add relatively little - they extend life by months maybe a year and are only available to those on the most costly private health plans.

Prevention is way less glamorous because it's hard to see the direct effect

Personally I think the big challenge is getting a positive diagnosis earlier - that too is a bit ironic for me because in my wife's case we knew she was at risk but no matter how early we caught that one it wouldn't have changed the outcome - some cancers will always be like that but for many if you catch them early enough they are curable.

So many people come on here with their stories of people who have been so apparently healthy until they collapse with stage 4 cancers if we could screen with a test in a GPs surgery that would pick up a wide variety of cancers at an early stage can you just imagine? There are tests like this for conditions like diabetes and there is interesting work with sensing dogs but it seems a long way away right now.

I particularly am interested in genetic cancers - for obvious reasons and we've come so far so fast there.

Not long ago human genome had not even been mapped and doing it took years of effort. Now someone with a high familly cancer rate can have their DNA analysed and we can tell whether they are at risk or not and for some of them preventative surgery or monitoring will save their lives.

That's the sort of technology that enabled the researchers to turn to my daughter and say "Your mother and grandmother died in their 50s of cancer but you don't need to spend the next 30 years worrying about that"

Granted there is a lot of work to do but I would say we're out of the stone age - maby the bronze   

Hi loves to sing

Thank you for your reply and your question.

Cancer is highly complex. To begin with, there are over 200 different types of the disease. And research has shown that many types of cancer can be broken down into further subtypes based on the faulty genes and molecules driving them. For example, breast cancer can be broken down into 10 different types, and there are four different types of pancreatic cancer. And there is even complexity within single tumours, where pockets of cancer cells can be genetically different.

On top of this, cancer cells are really clever. They can hide from our body’s immune system to avoid being destroyed, and adapt over time to survive treatment. Our scientists are working hard to understand how cancer cells do this – and how we can stop it.
 
All of this complexity means that even though we already know so much about cancer, there’s a lot more to learn to beat this disease. The only way we’ll speed up progress is by carrying out more research and clinical trials.
 
Doing this needs money to support the best research projects. Our life-saving research wouldn’t be possible without the donations we receive from our supporters. Whatever the size of the donation, we will put the money to the best possible use in our fight to beat cancer sooner.

Best wishes,

Kirsty
 

Hi Graham

Sorry for the error it was a typo, fat finger syndrome, I meant to write 45% the WHO estimated figure. You pick up on a very interesting point on treatments and that is the cost. Its not much good to the vast majority of the world if cancer treatments run to thousands of $ or £. and for much of the world even $100 is out of reach. Early diagnosis is definitey key but so is early commencement of treatment. Often it is a couple of months after diagnosis before treatment begins, giving cancer plenty of time to grow or spread. However it is interesting just how many cancers could be prevented and the graph in the link you gave illustrates this well. Kim