Question: Will we ever cure cancer?

Helen Frost answered on 10 Jun 2017:

Great question!

It’s easy to think that cancer is one disease, but it’s not really. Cancer is an unregulated growth in the body, but it can happen in many different types of cells, so the outcome can be very varied.This makes it really difficult to find a cure, because you can’t cure all cancer with one solution. Instead, there are thousands of different groups of scientists all over the world trying to find ways to prevent, detect and treat different cancers in different ways.

Some amazing advances have happened in recent years, including the discovery of the link between stomach ulcers and gastric cancer. There’s a species of bacteria called Helicobacter pylori which can survive the acidic conditions inside the stomach by secreting a layer of gloopy mucus around itself which neutralises stomach acid close by. This disrupts the delicate balance of pH at the lining of the stomach, and can cause ulcers. A scientist named Barry Marshall discovered out that H. pylori is the cause of most gastric ulcers, and that this can be a strong risk factor for gastric cancer. Thanks to his discoveries, we know that if you develop a stomach ulcer, usually a simple course of antibiotics will treat the infection and nowadays, gastric cancer rates have dropped by a huge rate. A century ago gastric cancer was one of the leading causes of cancer death in the UK, but now it’s the tenth most common cause of cancer death.

Marshall was awarded a Nobel prize for his important discovery.

I’m a microbiologist, by training, so this one example comes from my field, but there are many other causes of cancer, so we need to make these important discoveries and advances for each different cancer type before we can completely cure cancer.