Ask HN: How do we “cure” cancer?
I’m a graduate student study Computational biology, and I understand cancer is a catch all term for a variety of diseases that occur in different tissues as the result of different oncogene interactions and other mechanisms.
I’m really trying to understand whether how researchers and clinicians tackle specific cancers, and what a cure would or could even look like. Do we tackle some upstream system that prevents mechanisms that result in the slew of potentially cancerous outcomes for a given cell type? Are there common bottlenecks to tackle?
4 comments
Cancer is not one disease, it’s millions of different ones. I’ve worked in cancer research, and I believe our biggest bet are treatments that use our own immune system as a weapon. We won’t cure all cancers, chances that this is going to happen are very low.
Here's one of particular interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53
Please start with 'The Biology of Cancer' by Weinberg.
As you can imagine, its a vast vast field, and probably researching just one mechanism of an anticancer drug would consume all of ones career. This seems to be a good primer -
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29768576
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29768576