Will there ever be a cure for cancer?

-Daoiz Garza
Mao

The World Health Organization (WHO) note that, worldwide, nearly 1 in 6 deaths
are due to cancer. In the United States alone, the National Cancer Institute
(NCI) estimated 1,688,780 new cancer cases and 600,920 cancer-related deaths in
2017.

The most common causes of cancer death are cancers of:

• Lung (1.69 million deaths)

• Liver (788 000 deaths)
• Colorectal (774 000 deaths)
• Stomach (754 000 deaths)
• Breast (571 000 deaths)

The field of science my topic will use is medicine, and the purpose of my
research is to shed a light on how the field of medicine has advanced in
creating a cure for cancer. I will be using a quantitative method mostly in
this research due to the fact I personally believe statistical and scientific
facts are the most important, I will be using scientific data and percentages
in my research.

Cancer affects a huge percentage of people world-wide, by researching the

chances of a cure and how long in theory it would take to create.
Will there ever be a cure for cancer?

For years people have been looking for a cure for the devastating disease of
cancer. Cancer is the third highest killer in the US with over 2,500,000 victims per
year. Scientists around the country are researching all forms of cancer in an effort
to understand, treat, and ultimately defeat this disease. Already there have been
numerous advances in the field, such as chemotherapy and gene therapy. One
advance has been the use of a cell process known as apoptosis. By harnessing this
normal cell process, scientists hope to have found an effective way to combat
cancer.

Cancer is a disease that affects human somatic cells. It causes the cells to divide
uncontrollably and form masses known as tumors. There are two different types
of cancer tumors. Some tumors are benign and other tumors are malignant.
Benign tumors look similar to the tissues that they came from and develop slowly.
The tumor remains in the same area that the tumor originated in. Malignant
tumors are formed from cells that do not resemble the tissue that they came
from. They vary in shape and size. This enables pieces of the tumor to break off
and spread to other places in the body. Over the past few decades cancer has
become a very prominent disease.

There are many different types of cancer and many different causes for the the
disease. Most cancers are because of a genetic mutation. The most common type
occur when a cell is dividing. Proto-oncogenes, which are alleles in a normal cells,
mutate to form oncogenes. These oncogenes cause cancer because they do not
allow the cells to self-destruct or become epistatic.
One of the top researchers in cancer is Barrie Bode who gave an interview:

Where do we stand generally in the fight against cancer?

These are exciting times. The scientific knowledge emerging annually is

staggering. And it’s really revealing the complexity of these diseases that we
collectively call cancer. We are light years ahead of where we were just 20 years
ago and are learning new things about the biology of cancer literally each week.
In fact, we’re generating so much data now—including sequences of nucleic acids,
sequences of expressed proteins within a tumor, the chemical signatures of
metabolic systems—that there is a little bit of a bottleneck. It’s not a dearth of
data that’s limiting medical researchers but the necessary analyses of the
available and emerging data. Those analyses will ultimately reveal cancer’s
complex fabric and vulnerabilities.

Do you think there will be a cure for cancer in our

lifetimes?

No. It’s still going to be a long road, but there is good news for cancer patients.
Cancer is just a catchall phrase for dozens of different diseases that have the same
endpoint—uncontrolled growth of tissue driven by mutated cells. Each cancer is
complex and different, and even within a tissue there are distinct forms or cancer—
different kinds of colon, breast, liver and brain cancers, for example, all driven by
unique mutations and behaviors.
Current treatments:
Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are the three most common types of cancer
therapy.
Both chemotherapy and radiation aim to stop cancerous cells from replicating
through various mechanisms, such as by breaking a cell’s DNA or inhibiting its
ability to manufacture the building blocks for DNA synthesis. On the downside,
standard therapies sometimes make people very sick because they’re
indiscriminate in the effects on the body and attack normal dividing cells such as
hair follicles, gut epithelial cells and white blood cells – leading to hair loss,
nausea and immunosuppression, respectively. So, chemotherapy or radiation may
cause tumors to shrink but they also can have negative effects on healthy tissues
or systems.

Palliative surgery is surgery used to relieve symptoms and improve the quality of
life. For example, surgery is sometimes used to create a bypass around a blocked,
or obstructed, organ. It can also be used to relieve pain or pressure caused by a
tumour.

The surgeon will discuss the risks and benefits of doing surgery, especially when
the overall goal is to control symptoms and improve the quality of life rather than
treat the disease.

Some cancers are difficult to eradicate because they are very good at two things:
hiding and adapting. For instance, when patients undergo a round of
chemotherapy, often the tumors will shrink. The problem is the residual disease.
Through several different mechanisms, the residual disease can become resistant
to the therapy. So, it can lie dormant and then reemerge—more often than not
with the same properties that made it resistant to the first-round of therapy.
But how effective are these treatments?

A groundbreaking 14-year study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology

in December 2004 called “The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year
Survival in Adult Malignancies”.
Researchers at the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Northern Sydney
Cancer Centre studied the 5-year survival rates of chemotherapy on 22 types of
cancers in the US and Australia.
They studied 154,971 Americans and Australians with cancer, age 20 and older,
that were treated with conventional treatments, including chemotherapy.
Only 3,306 had survival that could be credited to chemotherapy.

The main goal of surgery to treat cancer is to completely remove the tumour or
cancerous tissue from a specific place in the body. Surgery is most effective at
completely removing cancer that is at an early stage, is only in the place where it
started (localized) and hasn’t spread to other parts of the body.
Surgery may also be used to treat cancer that has spread from where it started
(called the primary site, or primary tumour) to other parts of the body. The new
tumour is called a metastasis, or secondary tumour.

Hypothesis:
It’s clear we are a long way from having an actual cure for cancer, in fact many
scientists believe we will never actually develop one. However by researching the
effectiveness of current cancer treatments we can see which are the most
effective and continue improving the options of cancer patients. And perhaps one
day we will actually have a cure.