“We are literally trying to tackle hundreds of different diseases and none are easy,” says Boyle at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane. It’s been linked to mutations in between 5 genes (of the 20,000 or so in each person). Rather than one disease, cancer is a constellation of more than 200. What is it about cancer that makes it so hard to “cure”? And where are we up to with treating it?ĭarren Saunders: “I couldn’t do anything to save her.” Credit: Artwork: Monique WestermannĪsked why we haven’t cured cancer, Professor Glen Boyle doesn’t hesitate: “Because it’s bloody hard!” Yet, despite decades of research and hundreds of billions of dollars dedicated to the search for cures, cancer is still the world’s biggest killer, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every year, 50,000 of them in Australia. As a pandemic swept the world, scientists created vaccines at breakneck speed. We’ve found “cures” for other deadly diseases. Why haven’t we cured cancer? After all, we’ve been to the moon, as the cliche goes. It made me contemplate for a long time what I was doing.” “My daughter asked me: ‘Why can’t you just go to the lab and mix up some medicine to cure Nonna?’ Then my kids’ grandmother got lung cancer and I couldn’t do anything to save her,” Saunders says. “I was going around telling everybody about all these amazing things we can do and the advancements we’ve made in understanding cancer. The cancer biologist had been feeling pretty optimistic about developments in the search for cancer cures, with “whole new classes of treatments coming through”.

For Darren Saunders, it was a simple question from his young daughter. See all 18 stories.Ī crisis of confidence can come from the most unassuming sources. World experts tackle myths and misunderstandings about common health issues in our Explainers.

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