Why is cancer such a difficult disease to cure?
In: Biology
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly cancer is not a single disease. Cancer is not contagious so every time someone gets cancer it is a completely new development and a completely different disease that the doctors have never sen before and therefore they do not know its weaknesses. So the doctors are left trying a bunch of different cures hoping to find the right one. This is similar to how we have not cured the common cold because it develops much faster then we can develop cures for it. Except cancer develops even faster as each person have a different cancer entirely.
Secondly cancer is a disease caused by the body’s own cells. We can cure a lot of diseases by helping the immune cells detecting foreign infections bu cancer is not a foreign infection and will therefore be undetected by the immune system. Similarly if we try to find medicine which only kills the cancer cells the issue is that what kills the cancer also kills the healthy cells because they are one and the same.
We might one day be able to cure most cancers. We have made a lot of progress in coming up with the right combination of treatment and the survival rate for cancer is now much higher then it used to be. There are also a lot of breakthroughs in cancer research. Most breakthroughs do not make a lot of impact, especially not on its own. But there are a few breakthroughs which does show quite the promise and might be able to cure at least half of the cancers within maybe twenty years.
Cancer is, in a very ELI5 way, your cells that multiply without control. Your body is very special, but not flawless, so very rarely, there are cells that dont die when they should.
The treatment is to kill all the very numerous cells that multiply a lot, and thats the problem, that the cure cannot “differenciate” between what is cancer and what is not
Thats also the reason why people with cancer in hospital (in treatment) are bald and so palid, blood and hair cells are one of the fastest multiplying kind of cells, and the “chemo” or “radio” therapy arent that precise and cant know which are the “healthy” cells and which are the cancerous ones
Becayse of that, cancer is so hard to cure, because if you are too “aggressive” killing the cancerous cells, you might kill the person, because the “cure wasnt precise”.
Because cancer isn’t really a single independent entity, which would be easy to target and fix. Cancer is a malfunction of the cell, causing the cell to replicate and spread in ways it’s not supposed to. Since these are “normal” cells, just acting improperly, that makes them hard to stop in a way that doesn’t hurt other non-malfunctioning cells. If cancer was some sort of completely unique and isolated type of organism, then it would be easier to formulate treatments and drugs to fight that specific entity. But since they originate from normal everyday cells it’s hard to differentiate amongst all the normal ones. It’s like trying to find the bad guys in a group of people when they are all wearing the same clothes.
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