World Cancer Day 2017: Effective Cure in Five to 10 Years
Local Editor
An effective cure for all types of cancer could be just five to 10 years away, according to one of the world's leading experts on the disease.
Survival rates dramatically increased over the last five decades from an average of 24 per cent the early 1970s to about 50 per cent.
But some forms of the disease have remained extremely hard to treat - just one per cent of pancreatic cancer patients and five per cent of those with lung cancer are still alive 10 years after diagnosis.
Speaking to The Independent ahead of World Cancer Day on 4 February, Professor Karol Sikora, former head of the World Health Organization's cancer program, said advances in genetics meant doctors would soon be able to prescribe drugs specifically targeted at each individual's cancer.
He said the tumors in 100 women with breast cancer would all be unique to each individual but "understanding the molecular cogs that make cancer cells different to normal cells and therefore developing drugs personalized to the cancer" would allow "personalized, precision medicine".
"What it would do is suppress the cancer and convert cancer into a long-term chronic disease," Professor Sikora said.
"Most patients with cancer tend to be in their 50s or 60s. If they live another 20 or 30 years, they would effectively live a normal lifespan."
Professor Sikora suggested this medical revolution would happened "in the next five to 10 years".
"There will be, not a cure-all, but a much better predictive way of knowing which drugs to give to which patients," he said.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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