Here is my take on curing cancer from a programmers perspective. Extract a healthy strain of DNA from the patient, insert the healthy DNA into a virus that will be targeted to attack all cells of a certain type, which will include the cancerous cells. The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA, while healthy cells get the DNA they already had. It's kinda like reformatting a hard drive. Has anyone heard of a custom treatment like this?
> The erroneous/ cancerous will be replaced with the healthy DNA
Human DNA, weighing in at gigabases, is too large to fit into viruses. Also, 'replacement' implies getting rid of the bad stuff, which isn't really explicitly contemplated here.
Finally, if you are good enough at identifying cancer cells from the outside that you can target them for DNA replacement, you'll probably be better off by just killing that cell.
Actually, look up a company called Oncolytics. It's based around a technology that you can create viruses that only infect cancer cells. There is a lot of work going on in this area.
