Question: How long do you believe it will take to cure all types of cancer?

anon answered on 21 Jun 2017:

This is very hard to say – and I should declare now that I am not a cancer epidemiologist or a medic.

Research has recently identified a number of important genes that drastically increase the chances of someone getting cancer. If someone tests positive for one (or more) of these genes, then they can be monitored closely to ensure that if a cancer does develop it will be at an early stage and therefore easier to treat.

So that is helpful but it is not all cancers, as you asked. Overall, I would have to say my impression is ‘a really long time, if ever’. Some cancers grow in parts of the body that are very difficult for medicine to get to (like in the brain – due to the blood brain barrier which is a good thing in other ways). And some aren’t detected until the cancer has spread to multiple locations. But one thing I am confident of is that cancer survival rates will continue to improve thanks to hard working medics and cancer researchers.