• Question: What is the reason cancer hasn't been cured? Why has this been a problem for you? Is it a certain bacteria e.g. Mycoplasma?

    Asked by 889dagg46 to Sylvain, Dawn on 11 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Sylvain Jamais

      Sylvain Jamais answered on 11 Nov 2016:

      I’m not a cancer specialist, but the way I see it, there is a lot of work to do in the early diagnostics to give treatment a better chance., I hope to be able to help with that some day. In fact the instrument I am working on for tuberculosis diagnostics right now has the potential of being extended to also test from some forms of cancer.

    • Photo: Dawn Gillies

      Dawn Gillies answered on 11 Nov 2016:

      I think the main reasons are that there are a lot of different features that cancer has that makes it really hard to treat.

      Cancer cells can stimulate their own growth, resist anti-growth signals, resist programmed cell death, multiply indefinitely, and can invade tissue and spread to different sites.

      A lot of cancers which are difficult to treat are simply diagnosed too late. If a tumour is found early, it can be surgically removed before it has a chance to grow the cells which move away and create another cancer somewhere else in the body, and this will have a good survival rate. If it’s found later some cells might have already moved away – so even if you get rid of the original tumour the cancer cells are still there forming a new cancer.

      Some types of imaging, like a CT scan, can only see tumours when they are large so it’s already too late in some cases. This is why lots of people are working on new imaging techniques.

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