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Asked by anon-314948 on 13 Mar 2022.
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Sophie Langdon answered on 13 Mar 2022:
Yes! My whole job is around improving treatments for patients with head and neck cancer. There are many different types of cancer which all respond differently to treatments so we have to treat each type of cancer as a different disease. This makes it really hard to find one cure that works for all types of cancer as some cancers are more sensitive to treatments (e.g. radiotherapy) than others depending on where they are in the body and what genetics are involved.
I think in the future there won’t necessarily be a cure for every type of cancer but I hope that we will have more treatments that allow people to live as long as normal even if they do have cancer.
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Gareth Nye answered on 14 Mar 2022:
Yes it’s always a thought but it takes a long time to discover a cure, you have to test it over and over again to make sure it works and has no other problems. Some people work their whole lives and never find a new cure
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Kerry Ann Brown answered on 14 Mar 2022:
I’ve thought about how to prevent cancers. My works aims to make sure populations can eat the healthiest and most environmentally friendly foods. Part of that is thinking through the role of diet and nutrition in preventing diseases like certain cancers or heart diseases. If I can minimise the risk of people developing cancers, whilst also protecting the planet, then I will have had a very good day at work!
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Sara Luzzi answered on 14 Mar 2022:
Cancer is a very complicated disease, and it develops after a combination of things went wrong in the cell and made it go “crazy”. Each cancer is very unique and different from patient to patient, sometimes it responds to treatment and sometimes it doesn’t. I am working to find common features between the different types of breast and prostate cancer, to help find new and more efficient ways to treat them.
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Mary Clarke answered on 14 Mar 2022:
It would be every scientists dream to be the ONE that made the cure! However it is unlikely to ever become reality as there will be no “one-for-all” cure for cancer. Cancer is very diverse, there are lots of different types and within these types are lots of sub-types of cancers, so developing just one drug that targets them all would be nothing short of a miracle really.
But through research into the different types of cancer, we are able to develop much better therapies against the sub-types and hopefully will be able to effectively treat if not eradicate them one by one…. but it is very complex and is going to take a while yet to achieve. -
Maria Whatton answered on 14 Mar 2022:
Yes, I have worked on several cancer projects over the last 20 years. As we learn more and more about what causes cancer this opens up new opportunities to design new drugs. I look at the structure of proteins involved in cancer tumors and try to design small molecules (drugs) that might fit inside pockets in that protein and so might stop the cancer tumors growing. But it takes a long time to find the right drug and then a long time to make sure it will be safe for humans to take. There is a continuous stream of new cancer drugs entering and completing clinical trials.
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Elpida Vounzoulaki answered on 16 Mar 2022:
My area of research is diabetes and heart disease and not cancer, but I think finding a cure for cancer is one of the biggest goals for cancer! The problem with this is that cancer is very complicated, and different types of cancer need different treatments. With how much science has progressed I think we will see some big breakthroughs on cancer treatments in the next few years so I am looking forward to all that!
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Rebecca Locke answered on 16 Mar 2022:
As the other scientists have mentioned, cancer is really complicated and each type needs their own specialised treatment, so you can’t look at all cancers in the same way. My hospital runs testing to find mutations in tumours which means sometimes you can choose the drug which gives a patient the best possible chance. Hopefully in the future we will have much more information available about which types respond best to which therapy so we can really personalise treatments!
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