Question: what is the best way to treat cancer?

David MacLean answered on 22 Jun 2022:

Well, cancer is not just one disease but many different diseases (over 200 diseases actually), so because of this, it’s very difficult to find one treatment for them all. Some treatments are very successful for some cancers and some don’t work at all for others. The survival rates are very different for different cancers too, as prostate cancer and testicular cancer have a survival rate of 95% and above. Some cancers have terrible survival rates, like some brain cancers which have an average survival of 15 months!

A promising looking treatment, that could maybe work on many cancers, is CAR-T therapy. So the majority of the time, cancers can hide from the immune system. This means they aren’t killed and can keep growing. In CAR-T therapy, some of the patients immune cells are removed from the body and forced to recognise the cancer. After this, the immune cells can be put back into the patients body and these cells will then hopefully go and kill off the cancer! It’s a very cool idea and it needs more work but I believe there are now some clinical trials going ahead with trying to kill breast cancer using this method.