Question: why is there no proper cure for cancer

Alice Burleigh answered on 19 May 2020: last edited 19 May 2020 11:48 am

Hi Jan, wow what a great question! I think there are a lot of people who wonder about this. There are actually many, many types of cancer (more than 200!), which are all very different and so require completely different treatments, and specialist research to find out about them. There will therefore never be one miracle cure for cancer.

The reason why cancer is so difficult to treat is that it’s VERY sneaky and clever, and so can often outsmart treatment. The healthy cells which make up our body are constantly replicating themselves to make new, healthy cells. Cancer occurs when this process goes wrong and our body makes a mistake, accidentally making a nasty (cancerous) cell which is different to its healthy surrounding cells. The mistake might mean that this cell can grow faster, divide more often, control its surroundings, or avoid death. Like the healthy cells in our body, this nasty cell can also replicate itself, again… and again…and again… until there are a tribe of nasty cells, known as a tumour.

Cancer drugs generally work by targeting one of the nasty things about these cells, the treatment might try and stop them growing so fast, or stop them dividing, or try and kill them. The problem is, that like our normal healthy cells, the cancerous cells have a strong desire to survive, so when a treatment focusses on stopping one of their nasty behaviours, the cells change their behaviour to avoid this and survive using a different method.

Imagine you found hundreds of ants living in your food cupboard, all surviving off some spilt jam. If you cleared up the jam, you’d hope that this would kill all the ants, because this is their only food source! After you get rid of the jam, the ants slowly die and you think you’ve solved the problem. Only a few days later, the number of ants starts to rise again! Even though they have no jam! How is this possible?! Sneakily, although you didn’t see it, whilst all the jammy ants died, there was one, single, marmite-loving ant in the back corner of the cupboard, scoffing away on the marmite. As the jammy ants died, the marmite-loving ants reproduced, and before long, you have a cupboard FULL of marmite-loving ants who no longer need jam to survive. This is how cancers outsmart our treatments. The treatment (taking away the jam), kills off the majority of the cancer, which is when cancer patients go into remission- they become healthier again and their cancer is undetectable. What we can’t see is the one remaining (marmite-loving) cancer cell, which wasn’t killed by our treatment. This cancer cell can then divide, producing another tumour, which will no longer be bothered by our first treatment (taking away the jam), and now needs a different treatment (taking away the marmite), which might not be discovered yet. And what’s to stop there being a honey-loving ant left once we deal with the marmite-loving ones?? It is extremely difficult to break the cycle and get rid of the cancer once and for all, which is why cancer is so difficult to treat.

The good news is that slowly, scientists are learning to outsmart cancer, one step at a time. We have learnt that using multiple treatments at the same time is a good way of treating cancer, like taking away the marmite and the jam at the same time. The problem is, we can’t take away the whole cupboard of food at once, otherwise our healthy cells would die too. Scientists are constantly researching to find all the best treatment combinations for all the different cancers, but I hope you can see now why this can be so tricky, and why there will never be one simple cure for cancer.