• Question: What makes a disease treatable or not?

    Asked by anon-256593 on 17 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Javier, one of the things that makes a huge difference in this, is understanding the disease. If we know what causes it and how, then we have handles we can use to develop treatments. Otherwise it is a bit of a shot in the dark. It can work nevertheless, like chloroquine that was used to treat malaria a long time ago without actually knowing how it worked. But then when the parasites started becoming resistant to it, there was very little that could be done about it precisely because it wasn’t understood how it works.
      It is also possible that sometimes though the understanding is there, the tools are not. So for example some degenerative disorders like Alzheimers are fairly understood but the technology to intervene and prevent the neurones from dying simply doesn’t exist.
      This is why research is so important and so rewarding.

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      If it’s an infectious disease, it might be about how ‘clever’ the pathogen (virus or bacteria or parasite) is at hiding from the immune response, or adapting so that it doesn’t work anymore. Lots of pathogens hide in different cells of the body – for example HIV and TB both hide in certain types of immune cells, while herpes hides in the nerve cells. That makes them difficult to get to and treat. When treatments get developed (for example antibiotics against TB), some of the bacteria will mutate so that they can still survive after treatment, and those surviving bacteria will pass on their genes to new ones – eventually all the bacteria will have the same mutation. That’s how you get drug resistant strains. So even if a disease is treatable, it can become untreatable through pathogen evolution.

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