I’m sure this has been asked, but why can’t we cure cancer?
In: Biology
Because cancer isn’t a singular thing.
There are many types of cancer, which effect different parts of the body in different ways, and caused by different things.
There’s no such thing as “generic” cancer, so there is no generic cure for it.
Cancer is not a single disease, it’s a group of many different diseases, each one with their unique properties that require unique different solutions.
A tumor is when a cell suffers a mutation that makes it reproduce out of control, so it starts growing a mass that isn’t in harmony with the rest of the organism. Cancer is what we call a malignant tumor, a type of tumor that is capable of spreading to other organs, by direct expansion, but also because some cells get into the blood stream or the lymphatic system and colonize other distant organs (this last thing is called metastasis).
Now, whenever we have an infection caused by a cell from a different species (like bacteria, or a fungus), we give a medication that targets some molecules on the surface of the cell (some of these are called receptors). The medication is like a key, and those molecules on the surface of the cell are like keyholes, your immune system defends you in a similar way. But cancer cells have a problem, in most cases their receptors are very similar, or exactly the same as the ones from your own healthy cells (because cancer cells originally come from one of your own cells that went out of control), you can’t give a medication that kills this cancer cell without attacking many of your own cells. That’s why some chemotherapies are so aggressive for the patient. But some other cancer cells are worse, they have no receptors at all on their surface, or not useful receptors, they are like a blackbox, where you can’t give nothing, no medication that can target them to kill them, because they have no keyhole for any key.
That being said, we have advanced a lot on chemotherapies, many types of cancers are fairly treatable, and indeed curable if treated with enough time. So we can cure cancer, but it depends on the type of cancer, on the receptor on the surface of the cancer cells, and on the behavior of those cells. Other types of cancer, evolve very rapidly and you can’t detect them until it’s very late, when it has spread everywhere and it can’t be cured anymore, they can only be delayed.
1st difficulty is finding traits that all cancer cells have in common. Since you can have cancerous brain/bone/muscle/etc cells, and these don’t have a lot in common, this is hard.
2nd difficulty is that those cancer cells are YOUR cells. They’re…misguided, but they’re still yours. This means your body doesn’t typically take issue with them, so they grow and reproduce without issue. Lets say you want to kill all the criminals in the population- how do you identify them when they are *part* of the population? You *could* just kill *everyone* but that doesn’t help society much.
3rd difficulty is that even if you know exactly where those cells are, what do you do about it? If I have a clump of cancer cells in my finger, surgery would be easy, and worst case I just chop off my finger. Different story if the cancer is in your brain or your bones.
4th difficulty is that cancer spreads. If you catch it early, you might be able to cut it out, or shoot it with radiation, or poison it. But if you don’t catch it until it spreads throughout your body… well…cancer cells are killed by the same things as healthy cells are. How do you target only the cancer cells, while not killing the cells you need to survive? (See difficulty 1-3)
We can. Dr. Murugan at Algoma University found a way to target and kill cancer cells without harming our other cells. The method is patent pending, but eventually the method WILL be used.
Because cancer isn’t a disease, it’s a common symptom of a variety of diseases. Basically, cancer happens whenever a cell gets damaged such that its “brake” for multiplication fails, but the rest of the cell stays intact (especially the functions needed for multiplication). A runaway train, a car where the gas pedal is jammed, choose your analogy.
But there is immense variation in what kind of cells are affected, and how the damage happens (some common causes are infection, radiation, and certain chemicals). For some kinds of cancer there is actually a cure – e.g. some kinds of cervical cancer are caused by infection with papilloma viruses, and can be prevented by getting vaccinated against these viruses, but that won’t do anything good for skin cancer caused by exposure to UV radiation, or lung cancer from inhaling benzene fumes.
There kind of is a universal cure for cancer: chemotherapy stops cell multiplication and kills cells all over the body, including the cancer cells. The problem then is how to make sure that all the cancer is dead, but enough of the healthy cells survive to keep the patient alive. To take the “runaway car” analogy from above: it’s like trying to run the car off the road without killing the passengers. It’s a fine line in any case, and sometimes it’s straight up impossible.
Cancer is caused by a cell’s “faulty” DNA or RNA. You can’t really stop it from happening because environmental effects will always be present, like ionizing radiation.
In theory you could monitor ever single cell in your body and use super precise surgery to remove cancer cells when they damaged. Even if we had the technology to monitor and treat individual cells, the human body is made from several dozen trillion cells so it would be incredibly difficult to monitor all of them.
Best treatment we can hope for is gene therapy that will make our dna more resistant to damage or make our immune system better at recognizing cancerous cells.
Cancer is your own cells that have mutated and duplicate in an uncontrolled way.
To cure cancer you need to kill all cancer cells but the normal cells alive. Because there is very little difference between them it is hard to find something that can kill cancer and keep the patient alive.
Bacteria is a lot simple to kill because they are not identical to human cells so you can find a chemical that kills them but not human cells, that is what antibiotic is.
The human immune system also attacks foreign tuff in your body so they kill bacteria, virus, etc. But cancer is your own cells so the immune system sees it as your cells and does not attack it.
Cancer treatment targets the cancer cell by location like when radiation is used to kill them. You kill normal cells around the tumor too but you can survive that to some degree.
Chemotherapy is a cancer treatment that targets cancer. You have to target the slight difference and one is how often the cells go through cell division.
Cancer cells go through cell division a lot more frequently so you can kill it at a higher rate than other cells.
Cancer is also not a single disease but a group of diseases where a mutation in cells from different parts of the body and even different mutations of the same types of cells require different approaches to target them.
An analogy is if you look for spies. Bacteria, viruses etc would be someone from a foreign country where you can detect differences in how they speak etc.
Cancer would be a traitor from your own country that works for the eneym.
The traitor is harder to find because they blend in.
The traitor is a lot harder to catch just like cancer because,
Imagine finding a chemical that you can eat that would make your moles fall off. It sounds like magic. A mole is barely different from your skin.
A chemical has a hard time telling the difference between healthy tissue and a tumor: they are the same organism, have almost identical DNA, and don’t necessarily react differently to whatever you put on them. You can kill the cancer by, say, dumping acid or bleach on them but you’d probably kill the patient too.
Traditional treatment is usually extremely targeted: a scalpel, a laser, a “spotlight” of radiation. Chemo therapy helps but also is extremely debilitating because it’s not targeted. What is bad for the cancer is also bad for all the other nearly identical healthy tissue.
We actually do have several “cures”, people survive cancer all the time, but
There will never be a magic pill that “cures” cancer. Just an ever expanding suite of options that work in combo to incrementally increase chances.
Everyone here focuses on how different cancer cells are and how difficult to precisely target them; but our own body’s defence mechanism continuously fights with all types of cancer cells and annihilites them. The problem is, after a certain point, immune system cannot deal the wild production of these mutated cells.
So there should be a way to target and destroy all kinds of cancer cells, right?
They already have the cure for cancer, you don’t make money curing people. If there’s no sick people, many doctors wouldn’t have professions. Just saying. Cancer industry is worth billions. Bless up and disregard these other responses trying to gaslight you.
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