What is the thing that you are trying hard to find a cure for apart from cancer?

Question: What is the thing that you are trying hard to find a cure for apart from cancer?
- Keywords:
  cure
Asked by anon-251295 on 21 Apr 2020.
- Varun Ramaswamy answered on 21 Apr 2020: last edited 21 Apr 2020 10:11 am
  
  Mad Cow disease!
  
  (Not me, but I have a few friends that are working on it).
  
  Its caused by these things called “prions” in our brain, which are just tiny faulty proteins inside our cells. But the scary part is that these faulty little things can somehow teach EVERY OTHER PROTEIN in the cells to become faulty and our entire system just stops working!
  
  Noone knows how these prions are able to cause this, and there are quite a few institutes around the world, that are dedicated to solving this mystery.
- Anabel Martinez Lyons answered on 21 Apr 2020: last edited 21 Apr 2020 1:08 pm
  
  Great question – at the moment I think many scientists are focusing specifically on finding a cure for coronavirus. There are incredible efforts being made to target the current pandemic (it’s very impressive!). However, before this I think one answer would be any age-related diseases (type II diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, etc.). There are so many conditions/diseases that are specifically linked to us getting older, and with people nowadays living for longer than humans ever used to, there are huge efforts being made to find cures or effective treatments for these types of diseases. I’d be happy to add more detail if you are curious about any of these in particular :-).
- Fiona McLean answered on 21 Apr 2020:
  
  I currently work on trying to find a cure for dementia. It’s a really big problem and actually causes more deaths than cancer now. Dementia is a word that is used to describe a group of diseases that all affect the brain. Some of them you may have heard of like Alzheimer’ s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Others are less common such as Huntington’s disease, frontotemporal dementia and Lewy body dementia. These diseases might affect the brain in different ways. Some might make it difficult to remember something and others might make it more difficult to move. We are making breakthroughs though and I think that if scientists keep working together then we can find a cure.
- Wei Xun answered on 21 Apr 2020: last edited 21 Apr 2020 12:18 pm
  
  My research is a little bit different to the other scientists, in that the things that makes people ill in my work is not a biological process, but a social one. So the way we live in society, where and how we work, who our families are etc can also influence our health.
  
  Also my work is not about finding a “cure” as such, but finding ways to change how society is organised and its functions so that no one needs to suffer needlessly from bad health that can be prevented.
- Freya Harrison answered on 21 Apr 2020: last edited 21 Apr 2020 12:47 pm
  
  My research is about finding new ways to cure infections cause by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These are a huge problem for people whose normal defences don’t work properly. This includes people who have diabetes, who are at risk of getting infected ulcers on their feet and legs, they often don’t clear up with antibiotics. Other groups include people who have the genetic condition cystic fibrosis (CF) – they get incurable lung infections.
  
  My team is trying to work out why the bacteria in these infections are so resistant to antibiotics. It’s a bit of a mystery because a lot of the time, when you take a swab of bacteria from the infection and try to kill the bacteria will antibiotics in the lab, the antibiotics work very well – but when you give those antibiotics to the person, they do nothing against the bacteria in the real-life infection! So we are trying to find out what bacteria are doing, when they’re inside a person, that makes them not bothered by antibiotics.
  
  We are also trying to find new antibiotics. We’re doing this by looking at the plants and other natural things that people have used throughout history to treat infections, and find out if any of them contain molecules that can really kill bacteria. We think we have one historical treatment that might really work, and we hope that it might one day become a treatment for those nasty ulcers that people with diabetes get.
- Robert Ives answered on 21 Apr 2020:
  
  At the moment, I work a lot on developing medicines for HIV/ AIDS and lung diseases (but not corona virus). I have worked on medicines to cure malaria and TB – my company works closely with charities and governments around the world to help find cures for these horrible diseases that between them kill millions of people every year. Malaria is thought to have killed more humans than any other disease in history and we still don’t have a cure for it.
  
  There are lots of diseases and infections that we still need cures for, with new ones (such as the current corona virus) appearing all the time. The more amazing scientists we have, the faster (hopefully) we can find some of these cures.
- Gabriela da Silva Xavier answered on 21 Apr 2020:
  
  My research is on diabetes, for which there is currently no cure.
- Paige Chandler answered on 21 Apr 2020:
  
  I’m working on understanding schizophrenia better, which will hopefully help in finding better treatments!
- Donna MacCallum answered on 21 Apr 2020:
  
  Fungal infections… yes – athletes’ foot, but also fungal infections that kill people with weak immune systems or if they are seriously ill!
- Martin Lindley answered on 22 Apr 2020:
  
  Inflamamtion
  
  Well not a cure but a better way to control it
  
  Inflammation is an underlying condition across a huge number of illnesses and disease states as it is a fundamental part of the immune system …however…it does get out of control
- Sophie Arthur answered on 23 Apr 2020:
  
  My research wasnt trying to find a cure. Instead I was trying to understand the basic biology so that the information I shared could maybe help others working in that area to come up with a cure for different things.