Question: Why is the cure for cancer so hard to find?

Rebecca Cook answered on 19 Jun 2013:

There are two main reasons why it is hard to find treatments for cancer. Firsty, there will not be one cure for cancer because it a very varied disease. for example, one type of breast cancer needs to be treated different to a type of brain cancer. Find out how to treat different cancers is a lot of work and a lot of time but progress is being made all the time.

Secondly, cancer is an evolving disease. By this I mean it can change and adapt to its environment so sometimes a treatment will kill the majority of the cancer cells but a few cancer cells survive because they have found a way to be resistant to the treatment. These cells will continue to grow and the tumour will reform from these drug resistant cells. The way doctors try to prevent this situation is using multiple different drugs to kill all the cancer cells.