Question: Since people can have different types of cancer, (e.g lung cancer, skin cancer etc) then would you need just one type of drug to cure every single type of cancer, or would you need each separate drug for each type of cancer?

Josh Meyers answered on 22 Jun 2015:

You’re thinking exactly along the right lines Nat.

How old cancer therapies worked was by targeting any cell in your body which is growing quickly (cancer grows faster than other cells in your body). These drugs are still used today and are the reasons why there are such horrible side effects to many chemotherapy drugs. Our immune system (white blood cells) are also fast growing cells and so this suffers as well.
These old drugs are used against almost all types of cancers because they are not targeted in any way.

New cancer drugs are called targeted therapies and they are tailored for the biology of each different type of cancer. Lung cancer and skin cancer are very different diseases and so we can treat them in different ways. One simple reason for this is that lung cancer medicine can be inhaled, whilst skin cancer medicine might be a cream!

The drug herceptin is used only for a certain type of breast cancer. Imatinib is used for blood cancer. And Abiraterone is used to treat particularly aggressive prostate cancer.

There are a range of different drugs already for treating different cancers and we are going to need the entire range of them if we are going to cure cancer.