• Question: Do you think you will ever be able to cure cancer or ebola

    Asked by killerwafer1360 to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 9 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by Lilyoflilyington.
    • Photo: Carolyn Nielsen

      Carolyn Nielsen answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      There are already many cures for specific kinds of cancer, but some are more effective than others. For example, breast cancer has a much better survival rate than lung cancer. The treatments involved in these cures combine drugs, surgery, and radiotherapy. There is a lot of exciting work going on trying to get better cures for these more difficult cancers-including trying to harness the cells that I work on, which are called natural killer cells. One of their main functions is to identify cells in your body that are a bit ‘off’, like a cancer cell would be.

      Ebola is also a very difficult disease! I think scientists are making really good progress evaluating different kinds of treatment, but one of the main problems with developing ebola cures is that ebola outbreaks don’t happen very often in large numbers of people. The epidemic that we have sadly seen recently is very unusual and was so devastating because it got into cities where it could spread faster.. The reason this makes it difficult to develop cures is that for scientists to confirm they work, you need to give the treatments to people who are infected. We can’t just infect people with ebola as that would be unethical, but then it’s difficult to develop cures as there is no one to test them on.

    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      HI Killerwafer,

      Hope you enjoyed our chat the other day, and are enjoying IAS.
      This is really two questions.
      Will we ever cure cancer? There are hundreds of different cancers, depending on where in the body they come from. Some we can cure already (some blood cancers in children, for example), some we have no idea how to cure. I think that, in time, we will be able to have treatments for most of them, but I’m sure that there will always be a few that we struggle with because of how and where they grow.
      Will we ever cure Ebola? I’m no so sure about this one, Ebola is caused by a virus and, although we may be able to find a cure for the Ebola virus we have now, viruses have a clever way of changing themselves and it’s possible that they can change so that the medicine we use doesn’t affect it any more. We have an Ebola vaccine now, but again this may not last forever – the flu vaccines you get every year are different every year depending on what ‘strain’ of virus is thought to be around. It’s a constant battle and Ebola might be the same. The best way to contain it would be to recognise cases early, isolate them and treat them if you can and try to stop it from spreading.

Comments