Question: Do you think we will ever find the cure to cancer? If so when?

Alex Haragan answered on 2 Jun 2018:

The short answer: Yes – but far into the future for all types.

The long answer:

Yes and some types of cancer I think we will see a cure for in our lifetimes.

A lot of very common cancers have seen amazing advances in recent years. In my area (lung cancer) some patients are treated with certain kinds of drugs that use the immune system to kill the cancer.
This only works in some people really well – but in some cases people with advanced lung cancer are completely free of cancer even years later.

We still don’t completely understand cancers, and there are lots of ways of treating them. But with time we are developing new ways and we starting to see people cured that only a few years ago might have lived for perhaps a few months.

Cancer is a really big disease – practically every part of the human body can develop cancer, and there might be dozens of types of cancer in any given area (often many more). One of the big problems is that there is so much variation between different cancers – but yes I do think we will see cures, and I think we will see cures to some of the more common cancers in perhaps the next 10-20 years.