• Question: Are you close to finding the cure to breast cancer?

    Asked by annafrancis893 to Matt, Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah on 10 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by ben123, wilcoxo11, .
    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      The word ‘cure’ is not the best way to describe where research is currently going for breast cancer. We can’t cure the disease in the way you can cure yourself of the Flu or a cold but we aim to develop treatments that are so good that if you got breast cancer you would have no worries that it could kill you. So we really think about it as ‘stopping people dying from breast cancer’.

      The best way to do this would be to prevent people getting breast cancer in the first place. To do this we need to know a lot about what the causes of breast cancer are, including genetic, lifestyle and environmental causes. When we know more about this we will be able to design drugs that can prevent people from getting breast cancer.

      We also want to have the best treatments available for people that do get breast cancer. Because there are many different types of breast cancer we need drugs that work against every single type so that no matter what type of breast cancer you have it can be treated.

      Some scientists have speculated that in the next 20-30 years we will know enough about breast cancer that anyone who gets the disease will be fully treatable.

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      thats an excellent answer from Matthew. The best cure for cancer is to catch it early. In the UK there is the national breast screening program in which women from 50 years of age are invited to have a mammogram. a scan of their breasts to see if they have any lumps or tumours present. The earlier the cancer is diagnosed the better survival for the patient.

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I would just like to add that new targetted treatments are coming through. A recent one for breast cancer it Herceptin which increases survival rates to something like 90-95%. But that is only for a specific subset of breast cancer and it isn’t the right corse of treatment for everyone.

    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Everyone’s right the best thing to do is try and catch breast cancer early as this means surgery can often remove the tumour before it has a chance to spread!

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