• Question: If cancer is a system in animals bodies 'going wrong' why haven't we developed a resistance?

    Asked by shrimpiesoup to Mario, Dr D, Alexis on 20 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by genius.
    • Photo: Mario Ruiz

      Mario Ruiz answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      We can’t really develop a ‘resistance’ for cells that are out of control. Most of the cancers are due to genetics, so we would need to eliminate all cells that have the instructions for cancer (the cancer genes) in order to be sure that we won’t get it. But also think that there is not only one type of cancer, unfortunately there are lots!

    • Photo: Andrew Devitt

      Andrew Devitt answered on 28 Jun 2013:

      That’s really good question and there’s not a simple answer. As Mario suggests, the problem is that cancer cells simply look like fit and healthy normal cells so there’s no way of the body recognising them.

      But our immune system can detect cancer cells and kill them. But sometimes it doesn’t manage to and that’s when we get tumours. I’ve often wondered how many times we’ve had a cancer cell in our bodies but managed to kill.

      There are things called tumour specific antigens – these are things that we can see are different about some cancer cells. These are things that we can try to target. They might let us attack the cancer specifically.

    • Photo: Alexis Barr

      Alexis Barr answered on 28 Jun 2013:

      Ooooh wow – great question! You might think that by natural selection, people who are more cancer prone may have died out and people who were less cancer prone would have survived. One of the issues is that most people don’t get cancer until much later in life, i.e. after they have reproduced and had children. So they’ve already passed on their potentially cancer prone genes to their children before they get cancer themselves.
      It might be that some people are naturally resistant to cancers. For example, they might have a good mutation in a gene that helps to kill off cancer cells before they start to reproduce out of control. We need to do a lot more genetic research though to see if this is true and find out what those genes are.

Comments