cancer genetics

Curing cancer is a misleading term. Cancer is far too complex to be treated as a single disease. Doing so would be akin to coming up with a pill that cures all viral infections -- something that's all but impossible. In his second of a multi-part series on the issues and obstacles facing cancer researchers, our new Senior Fellow Dr. Chris Gerry discusses the multiple challenges that must be overcome, and a new paradigm for treating the disease at the genetic level.
When chemotherapy was first used in the 1940s, all of the drugs worked the same way by killing cells. The concept behind this was that, since cancer cells grow faster than non-cancerous cells, they would be selectively killed by the drug, leaving normal cells more or less unharmed.