What are the hardest cancers to cure? Why?
By Drone Staff
Cancers: Every cancer is absolutely horrible and I wish nobody has to go through this terrifying disease. It’s absolutely heartbreaking every time I see someone on chemo even if I don’t know the person.
However, if I have to pick, there are 2 cancers that are the worst in my opinion. The first one is pancreatic cancer. There are many subtypes as well but in general, this is one of the nasties cancer. It is currently classified as one of the cancers of unmet need, meaning we have not understood this disease enough.
For other cancer like breast cancer or ovarian cancer, the survival rate beyond 5 years has significantly increased over the past 50 years or so. But for pancreatic cancer, nothing change. The survival rate beyond 5 years is 5%. Meaning if you have 100 people having the disease at the same time, only 5 of them are expected to last 5 years or longer, the other 95 will die within the first 5 years.
It is so deadly because it is such a silent killer. There is no symptoms or nothing that is the cause of concern. But one day, you have a slight pain in the tummy or you feel a bit tired and you went to the doctor for a check-up, that is when it is too late, cancer has already metastasized.
Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma or PDAC is one type of pancreatic cancer that is extremely resistant to chemotherapy, you dose them with toxic drugs and they just resist and won’t die. No other treatment is currently available apart from surgery and chemo and that’s why only 5 patient for every 100 patients can survival beyond 5 years.
The second one is glioblastoma, a cancer of the glial cells in the brain. This is one of the primary brain cancer. So usually the brain doesn’t have primary cancer because neurons themselves don’t divide or not as much as any other cells and they are usually very well protected within the skull, so less damage is caused to them. But glial cells are cells that are responsible for nourishing neurons and support their functions.
And these cells do divide. However, recent evidence also shows the haziness in the origin of this type of cancer, so essentially we still don’t know exactly the origin of it. What makes this cancer so deadly, however, is first, it occurs in the most important organ of the body, the brain.
Secondly, it does not have a clear margin. You see, most epithelial cancers have a rather clear border, you can see the tumour and then the non-tumourous tissue.
This is good for the surgeons because they can easily identify and cut out cancer efficiently and leave no cancer left. But for glioblastoma, it is hard to know where to cut and how much to cut out. If you cut out too much, chances are you will damage the normal brain tissue and that is not what you want, so glioblastoma tends not to be cleanly cut out and cancer will quickly come back.
The survival rate beyond 5 years is 3–7%! And the cancer is also chemo resistant, and very hard to kill.
There are more, and each cancer on its own is a devastating disease. Progress is being made, we know more and more about cancer every day.
Advance in genetics, imaging, cell biology, immunology and metabolism are helping us understand cancer much better. But fighting cancer is equal to fighting evolution, and it is a hard battle that we need to keep on pushing forward.