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A cure for cancer. It’s so universally desired at the same time as being so devastatingly elusive that it is the medical holy grail of our time. What is cancer? It’s a disease caused by unusual cell growth that can invade different parts of the body and disrupt its normal functioning, leading to health problems. In the US it is the second leading cause of death behind heart disease.

Although there is no absolute cure right now, medical science has still come a long way. Survival rates have grown better and better and treatments often mean patients going into complete remission (where the cancer remains but becomes so reduced that it is hardly detectable.)

Let’s look into the most promising treatments for cancer and meet the doctors and scientists pioneering their success.

Stem cell therapy

Stem cells have the potential to repair almost any damage in the body. They are our raw materials – cells produced in the bone marrow that can either self-replicate, or change themselves into a variety of other cells.

Currently, bone marrow transplants allow stem cells to restore the health of marrow in the patient, which can then rebuild their immune system, while donated white blood cells attack the cancer directly.

At the moment bone marrow transplants only treat blood diseases like leukemia, and they are still not a guaranteed option. To help improve the treatment’s efficacy, doctors like Prof. Persis Amrolia at Great Ormond Street Hospital have been leading pioneering research into ways to bolster patients’ immunity so transplants are accepted as safely as possible.

Gene therapy

Gene therapy is an exciting experimental area of medical research. The idea is for doctors to treat a disorder by inserting a modified gene into a patient’s cells instead of using drugs or surgery. Cancer can be caused by a defective or damaged gene making a cell grow out of control into a tumour. By correcting faulty genetic information, doctors hope to be able to both cure and prevent healthy cells turning into cancer.

Gene therapies, including gene editing and virotherapy (using viruses to selectively attack cancerous cells) are still being studied in labs and clinical trials. One of the biggest obstacles to overcome is the delivery method. How do you get the new gene inside the cell? Currently the simplest way is to use a virus, but that comes with risks. In 2019 Dr Ravi Shukla at RMIT University, in Australia, successfully tested a non-viral method to insert edited genes, opening up more possibilities for gene therapy.

Immunotherapy

A large area of medicine, immunotherapy is one of the most promising treatments for cancer. Fundamentally, it harnesses the power of the immune system to fight cancer.

Immune systems are meant to fight off foreign invaders in the body, like bacteria and viruses, but it finds it hard to fight cancer because they are not foreign invaders, they are home grown cells. However, by using immunotherapy, we can educate our immune systems on how to target cancers.

In 2019, Prof. Kevin Harrington and his team at the Institute of Cancer Research in London used the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab to teach immune cells to attack cancers of the head and neck. The treatment extended patients’ lives by more than three years.

What complicates the search for a cure is that there can be no one-size-fits-all treatment. In fact there are more than 100 types of cancer, and they all require variations in approach, depending on where they are in the body, the type of cancerous cells in there, as well as the age, sex and genetic makeup of the patient.

Today, the most common treatments are chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and though they are getting more successful, they still involve attacking the body, which is dangerous and very unpleasant. This is why researchers are hoping to develop new and exciting routes to treat patients.

There is much more going on than we have covered in this article, and we will be keeping an eye out. Honourable mentions go to the search for a cancer vaccine, testing nanotechnology as a drug delivery system and blocking the hormones that cancers feed off.