Question: I like your work. Do you reckon you could cancer?

Matthew Lee answered on 10 Jun 2017:

First things first I dont think anyone can cure cancer. And that’s because it’s so many different diseases. Cancer means abnormal growth or uncontrolled growth of cells, so your cells never stop growing which is a bad thing! And as you have roughly 200 different types of cell in your body you can get 200 different types of cancer.

You can treat cancer however. And we can treat cancer and make people better really well now (it’s getting better each year). So the chances of you dying of cancer when you are older is getting lower and lower.

So, do i think i will ever be able to treat a cancer through my research…..maybe, probably not though. The thing is, my research looks at a really really small area of a specific type of cancer so the chances of our work (or lots of other cancer reseachers) ever finding one thing that treats a cancer is quite small. But, if we put all of our information together then we can build up a bigger picture of the cancer and that way we can treat it. So if we combine our research with research from different people then we might be able to develop a treatment with lots of people that will work. It will most likely only work on one type of cancer though.

If you’re interest in cancer treatments you should google ‘immunotherapy’, ‘chimeric antigen receptor T cells’ and ‘checkpoint blockade’ these are really really exciting therapies. They use the bodies own immune system to fight the cancers and help make the patient better. I think, that if you ever get cancer when you are older you will be treated with an immunotherapy and it will probably work amazingly well!!