• Question: what causes a cell to become cancerous and with the technology and future technology do you possibly think scientists could find a cure ?

    Asked by erinmason30 to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 20 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      A cell becomes able to form a tumor if it fails to respond to the signals from the body telling it to stop dividing: a tumour is out-of-control cell growth. This can often happen because its DNA has been damaged. Normally, a damaged cell will die by a process called apoptosis, but sometimes the damage also stops this process from working properly so the damaged cell just keeps on dividing.

      A cancer, or malignant tumour, is one that invades the tissues around it or spreads to other parts of the bosy. I’m not sure about how this happens: some tumours can cause new blood vessels to grow, so that the cells can get into the blood supply and spread that way, sometimes they spread through the lymphatic system. I expect Chris can give you more details!

      As for potential cures:

      /genesj12-zone/2012/06/15/do-you-think-we-will-ever-find-a-cure-for-illnesses-such-as-cancer/

    • Photo: Chris Kettle

      Chris Kettle answered on 20 Jun 2012:

      A cell becomes cancerous when it fails to behave properly like rest of the same types of cells. Ususally this is a refusal to die and multiplying without any control. This leads to “infiltration” where organs aor tissues can grow into other organs or tissues and affect their function.

      As Judith said, if these cells escape from the site where they started to become cancerous they can enter the blood stream or lymphatic system and go somehwere else in the body and start to grow there – this is called metastasis and is bad news 🙁

      We a re finding cures and treatements rapidly. The trouble is the treatmentsa re funded by drug companaies and they only want profit. The rarer cancers are profitable so they wont get as much research and won’t be cured as quickly as the common ones.

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