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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I don't have anything to add, but still wanted to say thanks for sharing. One of my friends passed away earlier this year due to cancer and one of the questions I've kept wondering about has been about our slow progress in curing cancer. (Which admittedly stems from my own utter ignorance on the subject!)

Edit: I've thought of something worth adding. I've been told that certain datasets related to biology and chemistry are normally paywalled. I wonder if restricted access to information due to copyright is also hampering the field's ability to iterate more quickly. It seems like a field that's serious about rapid iteration could make as much data and information available to the public to encourage increased collaboration and propagation of knowledge. Is Nature still considered the most prestigious journal?

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One of my friends passed away earlier this year due to cancer and one of the questions I've kept wondering about has been about our slow progress in curing cancer. (Which admittedly stems from my own utter ignorance on the subject!)

A lot of that "slow progress" is due to the FDA's intransigence and conservatism, even in the face of patients like me who are dying already anyway: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-ce...

See also "The dead and dying at the gates of oncology clinical trials" https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the... and my wife on what trying to enroll in clinical trials is like from the patient's perspective: "Please be dying, but not too quickly: a clinical trial story" https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...

We could and should be moving faster. I'm dying anyway, so if a treatment doesn't work or even harms me, I'm not much worse off than I was before the treatment.

It's important to understand that there'll never be "a cure for cancer". Cancer is not a single disease. It's more like a meta-disease. There are tons of different types of cancer and the path for treatment is not the same.

We've made tremendous progress in the last 20-30 years. There are some cancers that *are* effectively curable. And others still vex us just as much as they always have.

Compare: "When will we finally cure parasites", or "limb injuries".

With limb injuries, are you predicting that we'll never figure out a way to regrow limbs? It is my understanding that there's nothing inherently impossible about regrowing limbs, we are only limited by our lack of knowledge and existing capabilities.

I don't think GP was making any predictions, the comment was making an analogy to overly general disease specifications.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that there is a hypothesis that one reason why humans, and most other species, do not regrow limbs is precisely as a means of protecting against cancer. The few species that are able to regenerate limbs usually have to activate the regeneration, and that activation involves turning on an immune surveillance system that seeks out potentially cancerous cells and kill them efficiently.

>It's important to understand that there'll never be "a cure for cancer". Cancer is not a single disease. It's more like a meta-disease. There are tons of different types of cancer and the path for treatment is not the same.

I'll make an even border generalization. Cancer is one of the hallmarks of aging. And aging itself somewhat loosely defined will include all types of cancer and what are typically regarded as non-cancers, like Alzheimer's.

Saying we can never cure cancer because it's not a single disease doesn't quite strike me as accurate.

I'm not an expert so feel free to correct me, but my understanding is that there are plenty of other animals, such as the naked mole rat, that are effectively immune to all forms of cancer because while it might not technically be one disease, all forms of cancer share enough characteristics that there exist a small group of genes that are able to suppress it or develop an immune response that effectively prevents a tumor from growing.

I often wonder this myself. Maybe it is just that difficult a problem. Or maybe it's because Big Pharma doesn't have strong motivation when the treatment is more lucrative than a cure (Tamoxifen treatment can continue for up to 10 years after radiation and chemo for breast cancer, Diabetes treatment life-long, etc.). Maybe it's some of both.

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