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Comment by victorbjorklund | Hacker News Reader

Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.

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Correct. The people here saying CAR-T is a cure have no clue at all what they are talking about, and I say this as someone that is only alive right now because of CAR-T https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669

Why is it 'of course impossible'? Couldn't we someday have nanobots or other tech that could screen all your cells and be able to indicate whether any cancerous cells remain?

No. It's hard to get even small molecules where we want them in the body, there's no way that the gigantic molecular clusters called "nanobots" could reliably get access to every single cell. (What may be possible is using things like the Moderna cancer vaccine to make your body an inhospitable environment for the growth and multiplication of the cancer cells.)

If we were able to find cancer cells with a precision down to 1 cell, killing them would be trivial. There are lots of cells in a person. It's possible we will get there someday. I think bioengineering is the most likely route. I.e., design a virus to specifically target the type of cancer cell you mean to eradicate.

Strictly speaking, no impossible from our understanding of physics, but also an enormous scientific and engineering problem. research into that would take away from people working on more reasonable approaches today.

We already have these nanobots in our bodies. This is the entire rub with cancer. There is amazingly strong selective pressure to evolve ways to hide from our existing nanobots and make them think these are valid healthy cells. Artificial nanobots would be no different in this respect. As for why our nanobots aren't already perfect, it's hard to get perfect. In fact it can go the wrong way, some people's nanobots end up too aggressive and start attacking their healthy cells (autoimmune disorders).

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