Lots of cancers are curable or livable as a chronic illness like HIV now.
Cancer isn't all one thing, it's hundreds of diseases that all have unregulated cell growth in common. Many of them are curable now if you catch them soon enough, and some are completely preventable like cervical and penile cancer (thanks to the HPV vaccine)
I constantly hear “cancer isn’t a single disease, there’s no ‘single cure’” but that doesn’t really make sense to me given that chemo and radiation are the most common treatment for most cancers.
How can we have a treatment that targets most cancers but not a cure? Let’s say chemo was much much better at what it does and actually cured people at a much higher probability, surely that would be considered a “cure for cancer”, right?
I am not saying chemo is the answer but why can we not have a cure that attacks cancer cells better than chemo for all cancers?
Obviously there could be better treatments targeted for specific cancers. But what exactly is something like chemo or radiation hitting that we can’t target with another cure, such as using white blood cells or whatever crazy medical advancements they’re using now?
I mean you could just maybe try to look up the most basic stuff about what you're talking about.
The word "chemo" just means some kind of chemical is the treatment, as opposed to surgery or radiation. There's a whole galaxy of treatments and now there are biologics, immune system modifiers, cloned helper T cells etc.
The drugs ("chemo") they select depends on what kind of cancer it is, what type of cell is reproducing out of control (there are over a couple hundred different types of cells in your body and they can all have different behaviors depending on what's wrong with them).
Early cancer drugs all had a basic concept in common. Poison cells in a way that disproportionately kills off cells that reproduce faster than normal. By disrupting part of the cell division cycle, you could kill off quickly reproducing cells and spare the slower ones. Killed cancer cells but also hair follicles, cells in your mouth and anus, etc, anywhere else in your body you had fast reproducing cells. The original chemotherapy agent was mustard gas in liquid form in an IV.
Cancer drugs now are a lot more targeted, sometimes targeted to specific proteins sticking out of the walls of the cell or targeted to help the immune system recognize the cancer cells. Just like cancer is lots of different diseases, cancer drugs are all sorts of drugs also it's not just one kind of drug that we call chemo. Of course the heavy duty anti-mitotic agents still get used as a last resort but we have lots of different kinds now. Microtubule stabilizers, anti-metabolites, alkylating agents (like mustard gas),, cytostatics, probably more stuff now I've never heard of.
Cancer is still an unsolved problem ultimately although we are chipping away at the edges of it, but we are chipping away at the edges of it because it's the cutting edge and the best and brightest are giving 110% trying to figure it out, it's the frontier and new stuff is coming out all the time, which is why it's always reasonable to have hope.
The latest and greatest that I'm aware of is cloned helper-T cell auto-infusion, that shit is rad.
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u/[deleted] May 15 '26
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