Question: are you trying to look for a long term coure or a short coure

Vicky Forster answered on 12 Nov 2013:

Hi Harv,

Thanks for your question. I’m not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean are we looking for a cure for all cancers overall, or just treatments which treat some types of cancer? If this is the question, the answer is both! Historically, since people started to try and treat cancer – about 60 years ago, we have used similar drugs for anybody regardless of what type of cancer they have. Only in the last 10-15 years have we been designing drugs specifically to treat individual different types of cancer. The first example of one of these drugs if you want to do a bit more research is that of imatinib – it treats people with a type of leukaemia called CML. Before imatinib, they only had a 5% chance of surviving for five years after being diagnosed with CML. Now they have a 95% chance, thanks to imatinib. Imatinib only really currently works for CML though, as it was designed to particularly target cells with a particular type of problem in their DNA. So, in summary – we used to try and develop drugs to try and cure everyone, but more recently, we have found that this isnt working as well as we hoped, so we are trying now to develop drugs for each type of cancer to help patients. You can read more about ‘the cure’ for cancer and why cancer is not one disease, but lots of different diseases here: /genesn13-zone/2013/11/10/when-do-you-predict-cancer-will-be-cured/

I hope that answers your question, but if not – please do feel free to ask me another!

Vicky