If you choose to reply, please explain to me as if I were a child. Medicine/Biotech is not my area of expertise.
Cancer is an umbrella term for diseases with a shared feature: unchecked proliferation of cells. “Curing” cancer looks like developing effective therapies to mitigate this cell growth, and is usually specific to the mechanisms that led to this aberrant behavior.
Certain cancers share similar driving processes for their growth, or possess features that enable them to be specifically targeted and killed. Much of cancer research focuses on studying these mechanisms and tumor biology; some of this work is translated into drugs and therapies.
You can throw money at cancer and have no effect on the disease. But the biosciences are currently experiencing a bit of a technological renaissance, e.g. automation, labs as a service, massive reduced cost of sequencing, ai/ml.
I’d say large sums of money aren’t sufficient for effective cancer research, but they are necessary. Hopefully tech brings greater efficiency to the field.
In a certain sense, money can be used to solve all solvable problems since it buys people's time and expertise. In that sense, your question can be rephrased as "Will cancer ever eventually be cured?" The answer to that question is likely yes. Cancer is a group of diseases that one-by-one are indeed being "cured". The low-hanging fruits are exhausted, yes, but one day there is no reason to think that with enough research in gene editing we can't cure every cancer we detect. The time in years it will take to reach that point will be shortened monotonically with the amount of money spent on it. Although my personal guess is that the money required will be astronomical.
A more interesting question is whether large sums of money are best earmarked only for cancer or for general basic science. This was the fundamental debate between Sidney Farber (who wanted a "Manhattan Project" for cancer) and Vannevar Bush (who wanted more funding to basic science) [0]. There are whole books written about this debate, and from my experience I believe that true breakthroughs come when people are thinking multi-disciplinary and creatively, which means funding basic science not earmarked only for cancer. A good recent example of this is AlphaFold, which came from an unrelated field (deep learning) and is being used by my friends and lab-mates today for cancer research.
Refs [0] - https://erenow.net/common/the-emperor-of-all-maladies/3.php
Thanks again.
I’ve had some innovative treatments such as autologous stem cell transplant, been part of a phase one clinical trial so that my data may help others one day and lastly offered blood and tissue samples for study.
These treatments and studies don’t come cheaply. So, yeah more money results in better treatments and research as far as I am concerned.
It's exactly for cases like yours that led me to ask this question. When I fantasise about being wealthy, buying cars and mansions never crosses my mind. I rather throw money at organisations attempting to solve `rare` cases such as yours.
Cancer is certainly an umbrella term and a complex disease. Here is a ELI5 explanation I thought was very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tzaWOdvGMw
Personal Tirade: I am extremely disappointed how stupid medical research is .. trying to uphold the scientific method in the face of a near and certain death. It is all being done wrong and wasteful. I found papers from the 80s and 90s from physicians complaining about the same thing. If things go the way they are, we are not curing any significant form of cancer in my lifetime. Btw .. the fast-track of vaccines during covid shows there are scientifically rigorous ways of doing things fast. But the people who run the show .. I am not even convinced they are motivated to solve the problem expediently. We should be (A) sequencing cancer cells like crazy and (B) tracking patient histories. No matter where people live in the world. The data is GOLD.
My parent has a "rare" cancer .. but the definition of "rare" seems unquantifiable. If I was running the show, I'd sequence the heck of the cells for EVERY cancer patient, and throwing modern computing at it. As for therapeutics, we should be paralleling treatments and composing treatments. I have some doctors in the family who tell me since we are dealing with human beings, we can't be reckless. But what is the point being conservative when someone has 6 months or less to live? We need to move fast and break things .. at least we bloody tried.
However, the solutions are not as simple as you propose. There are a staggering number of experimental modalities used to investigate cancer. We sequence tens of thousands of tumors, many of which are available in public datasets. Digital pathology, single cell methods, spatial methods, etc. Large scale EHR management is a controversial issue in its own right, as is the question of breakthrough experimental therapies.
Cancer is just a very difficult problem with many facets.
But, I do know that we would benefit a lot from having cure for Cancer, AIDS and other diseases.
Other issues such as poverty, clean water, electricity, at least in my country they are solvable by having people in charge who actually want to solve them. Again, I am talking about my country.