• Question: do you think that you will ever beat cancer? and will you do anything with cancer DNA?

    Asked by boblong to Vicky, Werner, Nick, Madgie, Carla on 11 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by mylittlebirdxox, animalpm, laurasaurus.
    • Photo: Vicky Forster

      Vicky Forster answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      Hi Boblong, good question. Ive already answered a question very similar to your first one here: /genesn13-zone/2013/11/10/when-do-you-predict-cancer-will-be-cured/

      Regarding your second question – yes absolutely. All cancers are caused by problems with DNA called mutations, so we have a lot of these bits of mutated DNA in the lab – so that we can more closely look at them and what they do to cells. DNA can be mutated in lots of ways – bits of it can be missing, there can be too much of it, or it can be all muddled up and in the wrong order. At this very moment, whilst eating my lunch, im looking at this data. DNA is made up of four bases – A, T, G and C, and for a gene to work properly, all of these bases normally need to be in the right order. The gene I am looking at right at this moment has 680 bases normally, but i just found a bit 56 bases from the start, where instead of a A base, there is a G base! This one tiny change out of 680 bases has made the whole gene stop working properly! This can happen in cancer too – so I look at it in the lab to see how we can prevent it from happening.

    • Photo: Werner Muller

      Werner Muller answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      We have already made good progress for some cancers. We have drugs or developed treatments that are tailored for many cancer types. Each one is different and we have to find the right treatment for each cancer. This is a major challenge. We are getting better at the diagnosis and when looking at genes changed in a cancer, we can use drugs that utilise these changes. I think that immune therapy, a way to make the immune system help to fight cancer, will help us to beat cancer. And yes, we do something with the cancer DNA. We look at it with better and better methods and can classify cancers much better now.

    • Photo: Nick Groves-Kirkby

      Nick Groves-Kirkby answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      We already have good results with some kind of cancers. If we find a cancer when it is new and it hasn’t spread around the body then we can usually cure it with surgery (by basically cutting out the affected tissue). So one way of beating more cancers is maybe to catch them earlier.

      The problem comes when we don’t find cancers early and they’ve spread through the body, and with cancers of the blood (like Vicky works with). These cancers are far more tricky to treat, and at the moment we’re pretty crude as to how we go about it. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy work by poisoning and killing cancer cells, but they also affect our healthy cells too, which is why people who have treatment for cancer often appear tired and ill.

      I’m really hopeful that genetics will help us to treat these cancers better. As Vicky says, cancers are caused by mutations in DNA. The aim in the future is to be able to identify what mutations are in a particular cancer, and to be able to use drugs and treatments that specifically attack these mutations. With time, I think we should be able to do pretty well at this.

      I suspect we’ll never beat cancer entirely, but I think that within my lifetime we’ll make some real breakthroughs in how we treat it, and in how many people survive.

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