• Question: Can you make a medicine that can cure Ebola or Cancer?

    Asked by @LauraGillieno to Andrew, Lizzie, Nick, Sonia on 20 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 20 Jun 2015:

      Cancer is a disease of your own body. In normal cell growth it has a finite life time apoptosis and self destruct. destruct. Cancer is a fault with a cell which proliferate, but cancer is a generic term form many different diseases. So the cure is the ability to to allow the body to recognise these faulty cells and tell them to stop dividing.
      Currently the drug research is going into monoclonal antibodies where the drug is attracted to certain proteins to the rogue cell which allows the body to recognise the faulty cells or to allow a drug to attached storage the faulty cell to destroy it.

      Ebola is a virus which invade the body. Depending on which medical text books you read. Virus can be classified as a non living organism. It reproduces by invading a cell in the body and then uses the cell as a factory to produce more copies of the virus.current treatment is to try and block the virus entering the cell, or transfixed plasma from suffered who have recovered so the antibodies to recognise the virus is in the plasma which aid the affected persons body to recognise the affected cells and destroy it.

      Maybe one day we can manufacture micro.machined robots to perform these tasks such as the Borg in Star Trek Next Gen

    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Cancer is caused by mutations that constantly happen in our body all the time so normally our bodies are really good at detecting it and killing that abnormal cell or that abnormal cell will kill itself. So it would be difficult to prevent cancer since it happens naturally. But there do seem to be a lot of promising targeted therapies to treat cancer. There are also targeted therapies in development for viral diseases like ebola too. I guess time will tell!

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      I think they now have a treatment that works well on Ebola. It’s important to make sure that everyone has access to it though.

      Cancer, in all it’s forms, will be more difficult to prevent or cure with one treatment, but there is some work recently, getting the body’s own immune system to recognise and attach cancer, which seems very promising.

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