Question: How close are we to getting a cure to cancer?

Marleen Wilde answered on 12 Mar 2019:

I agree, cancer is an umbrella term. There are many different types of cancer, even in the same organ or tissue type, for example breast cancer. There many different causes for cancer, and therefkre you have many types of it. Cancer is pretty much a mutation of the original cells, that can be caused by external things such as radiation (even sun!), or chemicals but also internal things such as mutation of your genes or misfunction or miscommunication of parts of your cell. Some cancers are really aggressive, growing and spreading everywhere, others don’t. Some might not cause any problems at all. So as they are all different, they require different treatments. Some types of cancer can already be treated well with radiotherapy or chemotherapy (really aggressive medicine), some with surgical removal or a combination of those. But unfortunately there is no one fits all solution. It’s important to have very good detection and analysis methods to find the cancer and identify which type it is and then go with the therapy from there. There are some types of cancers that can already be treated quite well, with fairly high Life expectations thereafter. But there are some cancers, like pancreas cancer, that are often detected too late and that don’t respond to any type of treatment. For those types, still a lot of research needs to be done for better detection methods and more successful treatments.