Why is cancer so hard to cure? Will we ever find an infallible cure?
In: 2088
Cancer is the price we pay for evolution. If our cells didn’t mutate, then humans wouldn’t have evolved. Mutating cells is also the cause of cancer.
Source – The Body by Bill Bryson (pretty much an eli5 for the whole body)
Asking why there isn’t a cure for cancer is like asking why there isn’t a cure for virus. It’s far too broad of a category of diseases for a single cure.
Isn’t it because there is more money in NOT coming up with a cure?
Its not about killing the cancer cells, that’s easy, in lab trials, a .44 magnum will kill 100% of cancer cells.
The problem is killing cancer cells inside your body, while NOT killing normal cells.
Cancer is unlike any other disease.
It is not an infection by some foreign body. You cannot give the body a way to effectively fight off some foreign intruders. It also isnt some kind of poisoning to which you can give an antidote.
No, cancer is your own body killing itself.
Cancer comes in many form, its not just one specific thing.
In a fully grown humans each cell has its life and before it dies it creates a copy to replace itself (or some part of your body replaces it; red blood cells for example cant reproduce).
But what if, instead of reproducing just a single copy, it creates 50 copies. And they each create more copies, and those will create more. This uncontrolled growth is called a tumor.
These tumors feed on your bodies resources, while not serving any function or purpose. They can put pressure on nerves or blood vessels. Those two things combined can damage or kill off other parts of your body.
But your immune system cant do anything about it. Theres no intruder to fight off. These cells are still your body; and the immune system recognizes them as such.
And as i said earlier, cancer comes in dozens of forms and has many causes. There are several genes in a cell that could cause it to become cancerous. And there are dozens of reasons these genes could break. It could be something acute like radiation poisoning. It could also be something more long term like smoking. But ultimately we often dont even know where the cancer came from in the first place, its just there now.
It’s hard to cure something that’s a constant uphill battle. Way too much of the worlds water and food sources are filled with cancer causing chemicals.
Cancer isn’t one disease.
It’s a group of diseases with the same root cause – namely a mutation in a gene regulating cell division resulting in loss of control of cell division (and technically a mutation in the tumour suppression or immune signalling classes of gene).
Most cells divide in a controlled way depending on available resource, signalling, and other factors.
Tumours are caused by unregulated, rapid cell division.
The body does have genes for identifying and destroying cells with these mutations – tumour suppressor genes, suicide genes, expression of MHC molecules. However, in cancers which progress to the point they’re detectable – the cancerous cells also have a mutation which hides them from the immune system, or at least circumvents these self regulation mechanisms.
Curing cancer is difficult – breast cancer alone is >34 different cancers which all respond differently to different treatments. This is starting to be utilised with chemotherapies by genotyping (looking at the specific mutations causing a cancer) the cancer and using available data to provide the most effective chemotherapies for that specific mutation combination.
Also treating solid tumours – like synovial sarcoma, bowel cancers, ovarian cancers – and diffuse cancers like lymphoma require very different treatments.
I work in a company working on biologic therapies to treat cancers and the fact that our product only treats certain cancers, while my previous company’s products treat entirely different cancers, further complicates treatment.
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