Cancer under control by 2025
Published: November 18, 2005
Cancer could become a ‘controllable’ disease rather than a killer within 20 years, one of the country’s leading experts on the disease has predicted. [Everyone’S Guide To Cancer Therapy]
Patients will be treated as if they have a long-term illness such as diabetes, said Professor Karol Sikora.
He said it may soon be possible to identify those at risk of developing cancer, pick up the very early stages of the disease and control it long-term.
Professor Sikora, professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College London and Hammersmith Hospital, said the treatment of the illness is changing so rapidly that by 2015 everyone will be able to have a blood test to establish their risk of developing it.
It would reveal a person’s genetic background and calculations could be carried out to determine the likelihood of having cancer within their lifetime.
But he warned that the cost to health services around the world would be huge. And an extra tax might eventually be necessary to ensure latest advances could be afforded.
Professor Sikora was speaking at a cancer prevention conference in London yesterday.
He said: “The prediction is that by 2025 we will be talking about controlling cancer in the long term, not eradicating it but making cancer like diabetes. But the cost will be high.” [Cancer: A Second Opinion: A Look at Understanding, Controlling, and Curing Cancer]
Globally, health services would struggle to pay for new treatments and prevention strategies, he said.
Scientists today have to concentrate on diagnosing cancer and treatments to save lives, which will probably be delivered in the near future by large gloabl organisations running “cancer hotels”, said the professor.
But the ultimate goal was to prevent the disease, largely by encouraging healthier lifestyles based on and individuals ‘personalised’ risk and better screening.
“What we really want to achieve is to live for a long time and die quickly without any quality of life problems,” he said.
‘If you look at the death rate for cancer it is going down, but not fast enough’
At present, there was no simple blood test to look at the 50 to 60 genes that could increase a person’s lifetime risk of cancer.
“But in ten years this may be possible,” he said. “We could look at the genetic background to show what puts you at high risk. That could change the face of cancer.”
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