Blue Sky Science: How does cancer form and is there a cure?

Q How does cancer form and is there a cure?

— Miranda Garcia-Dove

A Christian Capitini, assistant professor of pediatrics at American Family Children’s Hospital, Madison, Wis.:

One of the hardest things about cancer is that it’s a part of us. It’s evolved with us, it’s been with us humans from the beginning. And in many ways, the cancer cells are using systems and processes that are in all of our cells to help them survive and help them grow.

One common cancer I see is called leukemia. Leukemia is a cancer of the bone marrow. The bone marrow is a part of our body inside of our bones that makes our immune cells that help fight infections.

Cancer is when one of those cells decides to grow and it doesn’t know how to stop. We treat that leukemia with drugs, called chemotherapy.

One of the challenges in curing cancer is always going to be: How can we find a therapy that’s going to attack only the cancer and not our normal tissues?

“Curing” cancer means different things. I think that a cure means that you get treatment for your cancer and it never comes back.

Looking forward, one of the questions we want to figure out in the cancer research world is how we can program our immune system to recognize and kill cancer.

That may one day take the form of different treatments like vaccines to prevent or to treat cancer, or finding ways to take our immune cells and reprogram them so that they can help us fight cancer.