• Question: How are people trying to find cures for cancer? What are they doing?

    Asked by 09stockwelll to Alessandro, Claudia, Phil on 21 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Alessandro Guazzi

      Alessandro Guazzi answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      There’s loads of work being done on cancer: people are trying to target cancer cells both physically (burning them or giving them a lot of radiation to kill them) or biologically (finding viruses which will attack the cells, or finding chemicals which will disrupt cancer cell processes and end up killing them), or a combination of the two!
      A lab in my building is concentrating on using ultrasound to destroy cells physically. This works by using sound waves to heat up the tissue and essentially just cooks everything! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hifu

      The problem most of the time is that cancer cells are essentially a lot like any other, just reproducing faster and in places where they shouldn’t be, so its hard to target only them.

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