What does it mean to “cure” cancer? Isn’t chemotherapy a largely effective solution? Why do they say cancer hasn’t been cured then?
In: Biology
Chemotherapy isn’t a cure, it’s a poison which slowly kills you, but because cancerous cells are growing rapidly, it kills them faster. You have to hope that the cancer is killed off before it does too much damage to the rest of you.
Cancer is a general term for a class of disease, there are many many different cancers with different causes. There are pretty effective cures for some cancers where a clear cause has been identified (like a genetic defect), and the treatment can directly target the cause to prevent the issue.
There are some immunotherapy approaches being worked on, and that is why RNA vaccines were being developed and could be used to develop a Covid vaccine so rapidly. The idea is you can sequence a tumour then make a vaccine specifically for your cancer very rapidly and get your immune system to kill off the cancer instead of drugs.
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