Why is cancer so hard to cure? Will we ever find an infallible cure?
In: 2088
There are many challenges to curing caner. Cancer is an entire subset of diseases, not just one. A lymphoma treatment may be entirely different than an adenocarcinoma in the bowel. Even then can vary from person to person with treatments differing due to random chance and genetics (this is relevant in a study that I’ll get to later).
Additionally, [the cure needs to also not kill the patient.](https://xkcd.com/1217/) Many cancers have a lot of overlap genetically, and physically with healthy cells. IIRC many of them can start off as normal cells, just losing the “stop growing signal” and then ending up in the wrong spots, like a mass from the arm sprouting inside lung tissue. So targeting them without also targeting healthy and vital structures is hard. It’s killing a small portion of something that is mostly human, inside of the human, without also killing the human.
Part of this is why you see sensational headlines like “new drug kills cancer!”
Okay it may kill cancer in a petri dish, but does it work in rats? Monkeys? Does it do this in rats or monkeys without also killing them or leaving them with debilitating and unethical diseases?
Or even if it does pass all of these, does the drug only actually work on a small subset of cancers?
[This trial made the rounds of reddit a few months ago.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/health/rectal-cancer-checkpoint-inhibitor.html) Some cynics were saying “guess we’ll never hear of this drug again!!!”, even though it was 1, already a drug in common use for another cancer, and 2, how often are people keeping track of drugs that cure a subset of a subset of cancer. It worked on people with rectal cancer, who had a specific type that is only about 10% of rectal cancers, who also had a genetic abnormality. It may work for more, but that would require further study, but for the time, that still leaves 90% of the other colon cancers, which even then only make up a smaller percentage of all overall cancers. So even if one treatment comes out and has “solved” a specific type of cancer, in a specific area, in a specific type of person, that’s amazing but then it just becomes a treatment. It’s no longer news unless you’re in that field or have vested interest in it like a patient or family.
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