How close are we to finding a complete cure for cancer?

Here's a little comic that actually rather succinctly sums it up: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comici...

We won't have a cure for cancer, because cancer isn't a single disease. It's hundreds. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands depending on how you count them. Sure, we call them all cancer, but each one is unique, though they share common features. Each one requires its own solution.

We're inching forward. Painfully slowly up a hundred mountains. And there is progress. Testicular cancer now has something like a 99% cure rate. Inflammatory Breast cancer went from a 1% survival rate to 60% in the late 1990s. That's not perfect but find me someone who will take a one a hundred shot over a 6 in ten.

There's a lab I ran a quarter ago for upper division undergraduates. I give them a culture of cancer cells, in a dish, MCF7, a breast cancer cell line. There are two variations of it, differing only very very slightly - they're actually taken from the same patient. Same patient. Same cancer. And then we give them some of the drugs that kill cancer cells and let them see what happens. The drugs work very well on one MCF7. They don't work at all on the other MCF7. And keep in mind, these cancer cells are from one woman.

There's some very promising things. We've got technology and techniques available to make a new kind of vaccine that can teach the body's immune system to go out and kill cancer cells much better than it would otherwise. They're testing some of them now. In five, ten years maybe we could have a shot that could stop you from getting melanoma - that's better than a cure. You never get it.

But that's one type of cancer. A big nasty one. That same treatment won't work on breast cancer, or bone cancer, or brain cancer.

There's a team in the lab down the hall from me that works on chemically engineering a better way to kill cancer cells - tools that can take a cancer drug that we now have to administer through an IV, and hit every cell in the body with, and make it so that it only goes to the cancer cells.

There was another team, not one I know but one that published recently, that took the T-cells out of two patients with Stage 4 Melanoma - a certain death sentence on a very short time scale. They reprogrammed these T-cells genetically, put them back into the patients and the T-cells exterminated the cancer. Fully. That was a total cure, at least in the short term, but it cost millions of dollars of research and weeks of labor by dozens of people to make those cells. Maybe it will be usable some day - and we'll be able to take a blood sample from someone with cancer, tinker with their cells, and make something that will go in and exterminate it.

A professor in a university near mine took the DNA for one of the genes that's broken in cancer cells- a gene that kills them when they become cancerous. He wrapped the DNA in millions and millions of little plastic balls, so small that they squished the DNA down, and could slip it into a cell. He then used it to put that gene back in cancer cells in mice, in a lung cancer. It was incredibly effective - not a complete cure, not capable of killing the cancer totally, but it savaged it horribly. Much better than any other treatment. Maybe useful one day if they can work the kinks out.

The thing is, don't go looking for some magic pill that you can take, that will kill every cancer ever. That's not going to happen. It's just not. Remember. Even what we call 'breast cancer' isn't just one type of identical cancer - I can think of at least five major types that are all nearly completely different just off the top of my head.

It's a long slow road that needs lots of brilliant people working on incredibly difficult problems that are only small, tiny, tiny pieces out of the whole. It's frustrating. It's slow. But cancer - whatever type and whatever form does suck. You're right. But what we can do now was science fiction in 1990. If you'd gone to the best cancer scientist in the world in 1986 and listed those things I put up above, it wouldn't even be science fiction - they'd look at you like you flat out insane. It's important not to stop working just because the problem is so hard - but it's just as important to look back and get a sense of perspective at the amazing distance we've come in so short a time.

Complete Cure For Cancer

As a person who has watched his brother die from cancer, I am disappointed that more has not been done to find a cure. But I also believe that people can do a lot to help to prevent cancer, such as eating foods that fight cancer and not smoking. Maybe in our lifetimes, we will see a cure for all forms of cancer. Until then, we have to find out why there are so many more cases of cancer in some industrialized countries. It's seems pretty clear that the polluted environment and the overall "chemical load" on our bodies has contributed to the rise in cancer in industrialized counties.

Cancer is a collective term for approximately 200 different diseases. Every cell type in your body can (in principle) develop into its own type of cancer. On top of that individual cancer cells in every cancer are also different from one another. On top of that, the cancer cells interact in very complex ways with the surrounding normal cells. So it is not all that surprising that we don't have, and most likely won’t find a single cure for all cancers. That being said, many cancers are cured on a daily basis. Most of them through surgery, but some of them are treated with additional radio-/chemotherapy. And some cancers are cured by chemotherapy alone. Overall cure rate is approximately 60%, so it is more likely that someone diagnosed with cancer will be cured than not. And outlooks are still improving - all thanks to scientific research.

We're getting there.

I was diagnosed with cancer last year and am in remission since April. Yes, cancer SUCKS! Some of my relatives didn't survive either. My mom was a breast cancer survivor and died from something non-related called Valley Fever. But I'm sure it was because she had a compromised immune system.

I also work for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in their School and Youth Program. I know that one of the drugs they provided the research fund for was Rituxin, which was used one me during chemo. The LLS has also funded the research for Gleevec, which is being used on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has Leukemia. Before that drug was introduced, patients had less than a 40 % chance of survival. Now, they have a 95 % chance of living a normal live.

We're getting there. I don't have an exact answer, but the research is getting us closer.

And, yes, it SUCKS that innocent people have to suffer like they do.

"Az R" has an amazing answer.

More succinctly put - cancer is not one disease.

Would you expect one complete cure for all of the infectious diseases known to man?

Of course you would not.

You understand that there are many types of infections - each a different disease.

Infections are microscopic diseases - just like cancers are.

There are many types of cancer - all very different diseases.

No two women with breast cancer have exactly the same disease.

100 years ago - infectious disease - especially tuberculosis - killed many more people than cancers. The average life expectancy was ~47 years in the USA. Most cancers occur in people over age 47. Connect the dots here. Cures for infectious diseases occurred one disease at a time. That is what is happening with the many types of cancer we see now.

We are very far from finding a complete cure for cancer, and I'm pessimistic that we ever will, or at least that we will in our lifetimes. The future of cancer treatment lies with this strategy: keep coming up with new ways of attacking cancer and figure out when to use each therapy or combination of therapies to attack each patient's tumor. This combines molecular biology with new understanding of cell behavior to push what has been touted as "personalized medicine" in the press. So within a few years, and a few decades, we will have effectively turned "cancer" into many, many different diseases, each with their own cause and treatment. We'll likely see survival rates get much longer with this approach, and we have a hope of turning cancer into more of a chronic disease, but probably not a survivable one for the latest-stage patients.

So, cure for cancer, not really. Reason for hope, yes, absolutely.

Go to Gerson.org they have been helping people with cancer heal themselves naturally for a long time and it works by just changing there diet.Watch a movie called The Beautiful Truth or the Gerson Miracle.

Not close enough!