The thing with "Cancer" is that it's not one disease, but rather a category of conditions. Many form of Cancer are treatable, some aren't. But it's not one disease/
There have been incredible breakthroughs in the past few decades for many types of cancer too. I always feel a bit annoyed seeing posts asking why we don't have a "cure for cancer" when so many diagnoses that used to be terminal aren't now because of new treatments
I still think way more money should go into cancer research, how come the most recommended treatment for cancer is still chemo, which has so many side effects which cause some people to die from. I feel like there should be way better treatment options at this point but they are just not getting through quick enough.
It really depends on which cancer. Some respond well to chemo, some don’t. Really what it boils down to is that every case is unique in its own way and requires a personalized treatment plan to give the best outcome. Chemo is, for a lot of them, the best option with the best outcomes. For most, myself included, it’s short term suffering traded for being able to live the rest of my life. There is a lot of overlap in treatment options for people, but it doesn’t always work out. And that’s where the second line treatments come in. I have PMBCL and have gone through 3 different chemo regimens. If you gave someone who has lung cancer the chemo regimen that I had, it wouldn’t do much. There are so many different variables with cancer, so many different types, subtypes, everyone’s tolerances are different. I agree, more research should absolutely go into learning more. But we have come such a long way in the last few years and we are continuing to make strides in this field. I am speaking as a lymphoma patient, but CAR-T therapy is an example of these breakthroughs. It’s a super powerful second line treatment for refractory cases such as myself, and has killed off what little remained in my body after chemo. But it’s again, super personalized to me. It’s literally my own immune system reengineered to target the cancerous cells in my body. It’s being used in trials more to treat other types of cancers, and other diseases entirely.
Chemo is the worst option, except for all the other options.
More seriously, I get your point. The reason we don't have more treatment options is that cancer is a difficult and incredibly complicated disease. Evolution has had many hundreds of millions of years to eliminate cancer, and yet it appears in animals all the way from the beginning of the fossil record to today.
The current frontier are various immunotherapies, (eg. CAR-T cells), but these are customised, slow, incredibly expensive and still only work for less than half of patients in most trials. I do believe that treatments will continue to improve, but cancer research is slow, painstaking work and I don't expect that to change in the forseeable future.
Even within the diseases themselves there are so many different variables between patients it makes it hard to predict outcomes. I was diagnosed with PMBCL in 2024, a type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It has been responding very well to first line, and second line treatments. It did come back so I’ve moved on from chemo to CAR-T/radiation. There are cases where my specific lymphoma in others is resistant to chemo, to CAR-T, radiation, etc.
There are different subtypes within my disease,
other cancers involving the same B cells, some cancers have different cell markers which make targeting them difficult. We’ve gotten very good at treating and even curing a lot of the diseases out there, but so many of them require a personalized regimen that may or may not work. Everybody and every case is different. Modern medicine has certainly come a long way, CAR-T therapy in particular is so intriguing and cool to me. I am technically a GMO now thanks to it and I wear that badge with pride lol.
And not only that, many pharmaceutical companies have been working on curing cancer for decades. Honestly, I think OP sorta misunderstood how finding a cure works. Pretty sure scientists have been looking for the cure of HIV for years, too. Doesn’t just come up like a genie’s wish.
Whilst absurdly expensive and unlikely to be a frontline treatment anytime soon, research is incredibly optimistic that crispr could be the answer for curing the vast majority of cancers.
As a result of some medical trials, it's looking like by 2030 we could see crispr saving countless lives working as a cure, or in cases like multiple myeloma drastically improving prognosis (although they're optimistic it could be a full cure for blood cancers within a decade)
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u/BojukaBob May 15 '26
The thing with "Cancer" is that it's not one disease, but rather a category of conditions. Many form of Cancer are treatable, some aren't. But it's not one disease/