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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of money to be made if someone comes up with a game changing cancer treatment - so the incentive is there.

It is impossible to treat cancer without killing cancer cells, so I'm not sure why this is troubling to see

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Not all treatments are equally profitable. I’m close colleagues with the cancer research dept here in Oxford and there’s more than a little cynicism about what types of pursuits get funding amongst grad students.

Diet change, for example, is generally undervalued I’m told.

I think it is important to delineate treatment from prevention. I would agree that prevention may be undervalued relative to treatment.

My understanding is that dietary effects on treatment have small effects on the margin. They might bump your survival a few percent, but are not going to reverse your stage 4 cancer.

Dietary research is probably good ROI, but is unlikely to yield groundbreaking treatments or silver bullets, like you mentioned in the OP.

Not all treatments are equally likely as well. Given how good dietary science is outside of cancer, less optimistic at rigorous studies in this area.

>It is impossible to treat cancer without killing cancer cells

best treatment would be to find root cause and prevent cancer cells from growing in the first place, I'd imagine gene therapy will one day be used to help with this.

Early detection would also drastically improve outcomes

That's the problem: there's no single root cause to cancer. Every cancer type has an additional dozen subtypes with different causes. It's a mess.

I find this video [1] interesting as it pertains to the root cause of cancer. Compelling theories anyway.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06e-PwhmSq8 [video]

Prevention /= treatment, but I agree prevention is good too. The HPV vaccine is a great example of this, reducing one's chance of cervical cancer by up to 99%, depending on the source

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