Question: could you find a cure for cancer without surgery?

Yes. Surgery is used to remove tumours that have grown. After surgery, people then often have chemotherapy (drugs) to kill off any remaining cancer cells. Typically this is the way it’s done. If the tumour is small, sometimes surgery is not needed.

But usually it is. One of the problems with tumours is that they are big masses of cells, and it’s difficult to get drugs into the middle of those clumps. So you take a drug (and the drug is quite nasty) and that kills the outer layer of cells on the tumour, but the ones on the inside are still there, and just keep growing.

So you need drugs that can get inside tumours. That’s actually quite hard to do, because you want them to react with, and kill, tumour cells, but not too fast, so that they can get inside and then do their thing.

One of my students is working on something to do with this, and can look at clumps of cells under a microscope, and then can watch the drug he’s making drift into the middle of the clump. By changing the structure of the drug we can change how well the molecule gets into the middle. Quite complicated, which is why it’s taking a while.

Anyway, if we can do that then maybe we don’t need surgery. That would be awesome.

However there’s another thing. Most cancer medicines aren’t great. They are not actually selecting the cancer cells. They are killing cells that are dividing the fastest, which are usually cancer cells. The medicines kill the cancer slightly faster than they kill you. Not good. So the biggest improvement would be to develop medicines that only work on cancer cells. That’s where a lot of research is going now. Tough one. Lots to say about it, and if you do biology you’ll learn about it. It’s really interesting because cancer cells are so like our own cells but there are these TINY little differences.