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Comment by aarbor989 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we hear about potential breakthrough cancer cures daily, but then never hear about them again. Do they not make it past animal testing or is our healthcare system so slow that it just takes forever for trials to move along?

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My perception is that lots of anti-cancer drugs actually make it to production, and they are wonder-drugs. Maybe people don't appreciate them once they become routine, but I personally do. My Mom beat cancer 5 years ago with the help of Rituximab [1]. This was approved by the FDA in 1997, a mere 22 years ago (17 years at the time my Mom needed it). I don't have the details, but this drug is very different from the previous generation of chemo drugs, so much so that some people called it revolutionary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rituximab

Every cancer is different. There will never be a single drug that deals with all cancers at once. Every cancer originates from a specific organ and even though the cancer is a collective of degenerated cells, it's program will still resemble the program of the original cells.

The nasty thing about cancers is that their development is probabilistic. Some cancers may develop in a more common way for which there are already effective drugs. But you might also get unlucky and get a less typical/less studied form of a cancer and then your treatment options are much worse.

This is slightly inaccurate. Pan-cancer treatments are rare but do exist, for example checkpoint inhibitors. They just work differently on every cancer and have different outcomes for each type of cancer. The single biggest factor right now on treatment outcomes is how quickly you find the cancer, because surgery early on is the best treatment, usually followed up with chemotherapy. These "miracle" treatments really are most impactful for late stage patients, especially those that aren't very expressive which means it's harder to find something to bind to the cancer cells and kill them.

I think the trials take "forever" time. Not to mention that they also cost "forever" money. If the investors or regulators are not convinced by the researchers you may say the "breakthrough" is DOA

Trials generally have a very specific time frame during the initial setup. Investors don't invest into specific treatments but into the companies, which can often make or break the company. With cancer trials typically this is a few years of studies at most. If results are promising they tend to move forward quickly, otherwise studies end prematurely for patient safety if negative outcome is seen. Neutral results are not uncommon.

I think it's more that researchers frequently overstate the likelihood of their work leading to a cure and seldom publish negative results.

Actually they do publish most of the results, it's just negative results don't usually generate lots of press. With cancer patients it's typically late stage cancer patients on clinical trials, many/most of which die regardless of the treatment. A very positive treatment can be on the order of a few months of increased overall survivability on average. Typically this means some patients get a very positive result but most patients have so results either because they aren't a good match for the treatment or are too damaged to live longer anyways due to comorbidities. Unless you're constant following the studies you're unlikely to see the negative results.

Because there’s no such thing. There are cures, or at least effectively so, for specifc cancers. There are treatments that are quantum leaps for specific cancers. But there’s no such thing as “a cure for cancer”

Specific cancers at specific stages. Later stage cancer isn't usually considered curable once it's metastasized. They just move to Zero evidence of disease.

What about the cervical cancer vaccine?

You're likely talking about the HPV vaccine, which is not a vaccination for cancer, it is a vaccination for human papillomavirus (which happens to be a common cause of cervical cancer).

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