How close are we to finding the cure for cancer?

Question

Because I'd like to be the first

Answer 1

To late for the most part if it is caught in time the info at the site below will stop it.

Answer 2

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 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. Approximately 60% of all patients diagnosed with cancer will be cured, and this rate will be even better in the future.

Answer 3

I personally believe we are tantalizingly close, and getting closer by the week, on many fronts in many fields of science.

If you'd like to help, one of the best things you can do, besides giving money to the various cancer organizations is to run a very clever, very convenient little program on your computer.

That's right.

A number of scientists, including cancer (and other disease) researchers are taking advantage of something called "distributed computing" to harness tens or hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers. Computers are great at crunching data, making trial-and-error (a once-hopeless method of solving colossally big problems) a viable path to the answer... IF you have a powerful-enough computer. The problem is, even the world's biggest supercomputers could not approach the speed required to use this method. That is until some very clever people over at Berkeley designed one of the first popularly-downloaded programs to utilize the idle time of all the Internet-connected computers that were running the software. They essentially created the world's most powerful supercomputer, with its processors (your computer and mine) sitting in homes all over the globe!

The goal of that program was (and still is) to sift through mountains of data collected by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, to determine if any of the signals recorded from space are of non-random nature, which would suggest a possible intelligence.

I've been running SETI@home -- probably the first popular project -- since 1999. The people who designed it saw how successful it was as a computing solution, and turned their attention to solving other very big problems in science -- including how proteins in the human body fold and misfold, and how that is related to many human diseases. They created a platform and program called BOINC which allows you to pick and choose projects that interest you. At roughly the same time, other researchers and engineers were creating other platforms that do approximately the same thing.

The disease-related program I'm running, called Rosetta@home, has the ultimate goal of finding cures for HIV, cancer, Alzheimer's, and other dread diseases.

This is real stuff, not fooling around. And the program runs very quietly and politely on your computer, with *very* little input ever required of you. It requires no expertise and no particularly high-powered computer, nor do you need a constant connection to the Internet. It steps back whenever you do *anything* with the mouse or keyboard; it's designed to be unobtrusive. Further, it is a non-profit project.

Check it out at the BOINC site, below. Or look into one of the others. You can help cure cancer!

Answer 4

It truly depends on the type cancer your dealing with. In some cases their are cures for certain cancers. I doubt that we will ever have one standard cure as cancer has a tendency to change (metastasize) differently depending on the person. What works for some people may not work for others.

Do you honestly think that the pharmaceutical companies would allow a cure to be released? Cancer is the number one money maker for drug companies. Unless a new disease is introduced a cure for all cancer seems unlikely.

Answer 5

cure for cancer is a misnomer. Cancer is hundreds if not thousands of different diseases that will require many different treatments and approaches before man gets any where near a cure for cancer. It would be major progress if we could cure just one or two types of the most common cancers of the breast, lung or prostate.

Answer 6

I spoke personally to a cancer research doctor who shocked me with his answer to this question....

There is no cure to cancer!

Cancer is the product of your cells trying to evolve to the new and changing conditions in which you live. You cannot "cure" evolution, unfortunately. As a cancer survivor twice, I have asked many people and read many books on the subject. This was the one that I find the most scientifically factual. They don't tell this to the public, because hope is a powerful tool for pharmaceutical companies. Sad but true. Sorry to burst any-ones bubble.

Answer 7

Hopefully I will never get cancer, but if I do, I hope they find a cure and the FDA approves the cure.

Answer 8

There is already a cure for cervical cancer

Answer 9

I believe there is already a cure, but the drug companies cant patent it if it is a organic cure. So they are not putting it out until they can make a cure chemically.Then they will make the money and the rich wont die from cancer.

Answer 10

The money is not in the cure, it's in the treatment.