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Asked by gissanekwh to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 20 Jun 2011.
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David Corne answered on 17 Jun 2011:
cancer: 10 years. Until then we will get better and better at treating it, and then suddenly about 10 different kinds of cure (or prevention) will come along at the same time. Most cancers seems to happen when cells go crazy and make lots of copies of themselves (forming lumps called tumours) – a cell is a machine that has about 30,000 different control knobs, and if certain groups of knobs (don’t snigger) are in the wrong position, bedlam happens. We know how to reset some of the knobs some of the time, and are always learning more. Eventually, we’ll have many different ways to kick the machine in just the right place to stop it going haywire. Common cold: I’m less certain about that — the common cold seems to be caused by a type of virus, and these are always changing and evolving, so if we find a cure it goes and changes itself so that the cure doesn’t work. But we’ll at least get better and better at relieving the symptoms.
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Helen Fletcher answered on 17 Jun 2011:
The common cold! I would put money on this. Viral proteins are very different from human proteins so it’s easy to design drugs and vaccines to attack them without having those drugs attack human cells. The problem with flu is that it’s a constantly moving target but we will crack it soon. Cancer is human cells that have gone wrong and it’s incredibly difficult to design drugs and vaccines that aren’t toxic to healthy human cells as well as the cancer ones. Also, cancer is so different from person to person that a drug that works for one person might not have any effect in another. It’s incredibly difficult 🙁
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Rhys Phillips answered on 17 Jun 2011:
Hmmm an interesting one. I don’t like the word ‘cure’ for a common cold as to me, a ‘cure’ would be for something permanently wrong with someone.
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Ian van der Linde answered on 20 Jun 2011:
Cancer isn’t one thing, it’s a whole slew of different diseases with different causes and different treatments. There are already vaccines that can prevent certain types of cancer (notably liver and cervical) that are caused by viruses. They are also developing vaccines that fight already established cancers, so I think that they will manage this (to “cure” at least one type of cancer with a drug treatment) before they manage to find an effective drug to cure a cold, for the reasons outlined by David.
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