Why is cancer so hard to cure? Will we ever find an infallible cure?
In: 2088
A few reasons.
First off, “Cancer” isn’t just a single disease. It’s a category of diseases that all arise from cell machinery that malfunctions and causes the cells to divide out of control.
There are a LOT of different causes for that kind of malfunction, so coming up with any kind of one-size-fits-all preventive treatment is effectively impossible.
It can crop up in lots of different types and different parts of the body. Again, one kind of cancer can be like a completely different disease compared to another.
By and large, trying to come up with a panacea that works on an entire class of diseases is a fool’s errand. It makes much better sense to come up with targeted treatments and then use the one that’s the most effective for a given type of cancer. It’s like how we have to use different antibiotics for different kinds of bacteria – antibiotics in general have been a godsend for humanity, but some classes of antibiotic just wouldn’t work on the wrong kind of bacteria.
On the plus side, there’s some really encouraging work going on with gene therapy and immunotherapy.
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