• Question: If you found a way for people to live with cancer like those with AIDS do in MEDC's would you carry on to find a complete cure or just carry on improving their lives?

    Asked by riannarascal to Gioia, Iain, Jo, Leo, Mariam on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by catrionad.
    • Photo: Joanna Watson

      Joanna Watson answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      It’s really great that with the right medications people who are infected with HIV can live relatively normal lives. The medicines that they take can have some horrible side effects though, and there is always a risk that diseases will become resistant and the drugs won’t work any more.

      So the simple answer is, yes, it’s great to find ways good medicines and improve people’s lives, but finding a total cure (for HIV or cancer) would be even better so I would carry on.

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Yes, I would carry on as long as I thought I could do somthing to help. I work for a charity, so my alligence is with the public.

      It is a bit different for pharmaceutical companies, because they need to make money. There is one anti-cancer drug, called imatinib, which works really well on a very specific type of leukaemia, except if you ever stop taking the drug then the cancer comes back. This is really good from the pharmaceutical companies point of view, because every customer is a customer for life.

      The pharmaceutical companies only make medicines that will make them money, and you can’t blame them really. If they didn’t make money, they would go bankrupt and stop making medicines all together. Then nobody would make them, because charities and universities don’t have enough funding the develop them.

    • Photo: Mariam Orme

      Mariam Orme answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Fantastic question! Actually, some cancers can already be controlled so that the patient just lives with it. If we found a way to do that for all cancer patients, meaning that they could lead completely normal, healthy lives, then it would probably make sense to put our energy into researching some other disease. The work I do can also be applied to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, so I’d probably switch to working on that!

    • Photo: Gioia Cherubini

      Gioia Cherubini answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Good question!

      Personally I would feel much happier if we could discover treatments to get rid of cancer. However, there is the possibility that, since cancer is such a complicated disease that keeps evolving (for example, at first you can kill cancer cells with a certain drug, but then some become resistant to the drug and you need to find another drug or another treatment to try to kill the cells), the best that research can do is to give the possibility to live with cancer

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