• Question: would it be able to cure cancer for animals or humans? can a animal get cancer naturally like humans or would a human have to give them it and how?

    Asked by issy to Alex on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Alex Pool

      Alex Pool answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Great questions Issy.

      Animals can get cancer just like us. So just like us they can get mutations in their DNA that makes a cell go wrong, and cancer forms.

      When we’re using animals in the lab we are able to make the animal get cancer (it sounds horrible, but I promise the animals are really well looked after – I don’t actually work on animals anymore). We do this by either manipulating their DNA (so genetic modification) to change their genes to make them more likely to get cancer, or we can directly inject cancer cells which can then grow (but this has to be a special type of mouse with no immune system as otherwise the immune system would see the cancer as foreign and kill it – which doesn’t happen in normal cancer).

      A cure to cancer may be able to help treat an animal with cancer, as a lot of the biochemistry in animals and humans is the same, but there are also quite a few differences, so some treatments might help, and others would have no effect.

Comments

  • Photo: Philip

    Philip commented on :

    It might be worth commenting hat while some forms of cancer might be considered “natural”, many are not as the are caused by certain habits that we humans have and that are not shared by animals, like: smoking, drinking, sun-bathing, eating badly, using certain chemicals …