How come we can find cures for up-and-coming diseases in usually less than ten years, but cancer has existed for so long and there still isn’t a reliable cure?
In: Biology
If it helps, we didn’t so much find a cure for, say, COVID as we did figure out a way to tell our body “holy shit this thing will kill you and you definitely need to kill it”. Our body’s immune system – an incredibly intricate structure – does the rest.
The problem with cancer is that cancer by nature has figured out how to evade the body’s immune system, in part because cancer cells are our own cells (and therefore bear many of the chemical markings our body uses to avoid attacking itself). Our immune system’s evolution is constrained by the need to (a) not attack its own healthy cells (so it can’t be too sensitive to small changes) *and* (b) to hunt and kill cancerous cells (so it has to be willing to attack them *sometimes*). The balance we have is basically the best it can do, which does a good job of holding off cancer until very late in life in most people. By the time you get cancer, your immune system has fended off literally billions of potential proto-cancers – but you live a long time and you have a lot of cells, so eventually one of them can roll the dice exactly right.
Latest Answers