Cancer Research Funding

[Birdscape]

I was watching the celebrity bake off which is in aid of Stand Up to Cancer. With all the funding raised (and I appreciate a lot of progress has been made and that people are living longer), is there ever likely to be a cure for this disease given the amount that has already been spent on research? And yes, I have been directly affected by cancer and would love a cure to be found.

Pretty sure I’ve read something reliable that said there will always be people with cancer too advanced to save/cure even if there was a something close to a cure. But, as you say, treatments might give them a longer/better quality of life.

I fear we are a very long way from curing all cancers, especially as there are so many types, even within the umbrella “breast cancer”, lung cancer “ categories etc

If only the money from premiership football and formula 1 were spent on the research then we might get there quicker

As much as I'd love for a cure to be found, I don't believe that cancer research is good value for money these days. Findings that make a significant difference seem to be rare these days and you never hear stories of promising leads that can't be followed up because of lack of funding, but there are often news stories about how some every day activity leads to a minute increase in cancer risk. It seems to me that there's more money for cancer research than people know what to do with. However, people continue to donate in hope of a cure because it is such a horrendous and wide-spread illness, which I do understand.

Sadly, there are many equally horrific illnesses where research is not very well funded, simply because they're less common. Yet money directed to those causes could lead to significant breakthroughs.

Good point Duck, sadly I think you may be right.

I do think (and hope) that chemo will seem barbaric in decades/centuries to come.

I get the impression that they are making huge improvements to cancer treatment. They may never find a "cure" but if they continue finding better treatments with less side affects then I think it is worth it.

If you don't agree then give to other charities instead. You don't have to donate to a charity if you don't agree with their work.

YY Dalek Many people are left with health issues due to chemo even after they have been declared cancer free.

There will never be 'a' cure for cancer because cancer is not one disease, it is hundreds, possibly thousands. There are some that have a 95% 5 year survival rate and some that have 0%.

The research is going into finding the specific cure for 'a' type in 'a' person.

There are some really exciting possibilities with gene editing and immunotherapy that actually could, in the near future, provide those illusive cures.

The problem is it’s not just one disease so a “cure” could help some people but not everyone.
Another problem is people think of cancer(s) like a virus/bacteria - that you fight against a specific invader. But in the simplest terms, it’s your body going wrong, you are just not fixing all the bits going wrong in time. Eg your body isn’t killing off the cells that it should. That’s why cancer is so prevalence in an aging society now that we have vaccines in place, heart disease is well known etc so we are curing things that can be cured or prevented and leaving us free for our own bodies just to start going wrong. Yes there are other things that can speed up this process but if the expected age we live to has increased over time from 40’s to 80’s, then something is going to kill you off. And if you fix one thing, then there’s always a chance that another piece in the process will go wrong.
I think it’s really wrong that all the messages about cancer make you think it is one disease that has one cure.

They may never find a "cure"

I believe current thinking is that the best likely outcome would be many/most cancers reduced to a chronic, serious but usually manageable condition, in the way of (say) AIDS or Type 1 Diabetes.

I have this view that every now and again, the media pumps out a story of a cure for this,that or the other and of course its always 10 years down line and ,well,,,thats the last we hear of it.

I think Universities and research groups pump out these stories to encourage more money for research grants to keep the whole merry go around afloat.

It seems to me that cancer care hasnt moved on that much. The mainstay is still Detect early and cut it out..

My partner won't donate to CRUK and he works for them. Unfortunately too many people (medics) concentrating on building CVs instead of coming up with treatments that actually work. He says if you want to donate, donate to Macmillan etc.

Andromeida what is your partners view on the latest campaign.

Andromeida29 that's a very interesting point of view and you may well be right.

You can’t find a pill which cures cancer for all the reasons stated upthread but you can do a lot of stuff incrementally. The HPV vaccine combined with more sophisticated pre-smear tests is expected to reduce cervical cancer massively over the next forty years, and it will help with other HPV related cancers too. Vitamin D fortification of food might possibly reduce rates of several major cancers (big if there but it’s got huge potential) . And ten year survival rates for breast cancer pretty much doubled from 40% to 78% over 40 years - which has made a huge difference to many thousands of women’s lives.

A relative of mine is living with the after effects of chemo and cancer surgery - a nagging permanent cough and vulnerability to infection due to lymph node removal. It’s not ideal, but it’s infinitely better than the alternative.

And they’re finally making progress on more sophisticated and useful prostate cancer tests beyond the deeply flawed current standard.

There are lots of cures for several cancers. If you mean a single cure for all cancers that doesn't involve surgery, that's still a long way away.

There have been highly significant advances in recent years, with things like monoclonal antibodies (e.g trastuzumab for Her2-positive breast tumours) and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (e.g. imatinib for certain leukaemias) providing more effective and less brutal treatments than conventional chemotherapy. There are also many existing drugs used for other conditions (e.g. bisphosphonates and statins) that have been shown to be potentially useful in hard-to-treat ovarian cancers. Stem cell therapies are still at a fairly early stage; it would seem odd to stop funding research in these areas.

Is cancer ever really cured though? I mean once you have it,even the best cure surely cannot eradicate every single atom of it ? Surely what is being done is to push out its chances of re-emerging in a dangerous way further down the timeline.

Raspberry - you may be right. E.g. My grandmother had cervical cancer in her 60's. Got the all clear, but she then died of bowel cancer in her early 80's. No way of knowing if it was connected or if she was just prone to it, but i have read that there are connections between surviving breast cancer and ovarian cancer, for example.

It's such a vile and complex disease that "a cure" is very over simplified, but I do think they are making strides in terms of curing some types and prolonging life.

Sorry, I meant surviving breast cancer and then subsequently developing ovarian cancer

RaspberryCheese
Is cancer ever really cured though? I mean once you have it,even the best cure surely cannot eradicate every single atom of it ? Surely what is being done is to push out its chances of re-emerging in a dangerous way further down the timeline.

Well, going back to the example of imatinib in treatment of leukaemias, it's not a cure but chronic myeloid leukaemia patients who continue to take the drug have nearly the same life-expectancy as age-matched controls without the disease. This is much like patients with hypertension taking ramipril or indapamide, for example: it doesn't make the condition disappear but it controls it and prevents it from causing you harm.

In some forms of cancer, careful management with chemotherapy or newer drugs after surgery can be associated with very, very low levels of recurrence. For example, about 98% of men treated for testicular cancer survive more than 5 years, and 100% of those treated at the earliest stage survive for 5 years. There is no significant drop-off in survival after the 5-year point, so patients who survive for 5 years are assumed to be cured (www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/testicular-cancer/survival).

There are huge advances in cancer treatment with immunotherapy being a key one. There’s a drug called nivolumab which is having extraordinary effects on some late stage melanoma patients. The main problem is that a lot of treatments are not paid for by the NHS but are given to private patients or those who can pay, especially in rarer cancers. My husband has a rare incurable cancer. His treatment plan simply isn’t available on the NHS but our insurance is covering it with no questions asked. Much as people say that the NHS is the way to go for cancer treatment I disagree, private care from consultants who are experts in their field and who also work in the NHS and are involved in research gives patients the option to be treated off protocol. My DH ‘s future treatment will include immunotherapy and various virology things which simply wouldn’t be an option on the NHS and hopefully we can prolong his life a bit more than we could otherwise