Every time you hear that they developed a drug that selectively kills cancer cells in vitro, that’s an incremental step. When you hear that someone successfully cured a specific type of cancer in rats, that’s an incremental step.
Because you don’t look for it, you don’t find it. Little advancements don’t make it to general news outlets. When you hear big news like that doctor that cured pancreatic cancer, you can assume it’s being blown out of proportion until proven otherwise.
Cancer is not a single diseases, it’s many. And yes, many types of cancer can be treated successfully today, people’s lives are saved, and new, functioning drugs are created constantly. Progress is HUGE.
? There’s advances all the time.
You probably live in some sort of a bubble as there’s news about new medications and treatments more than ever.
I understand that those are meant to maintain it. I meant actually curing all types of cancer as a whole.
To put a slightly different spin on what the other guys said:
Saying “cure all cancer” is like saying “cure all germs”. There’s just so many kinds and causes. It’s not one thing.
That’s because cancer is an umbrella term that encompasses tons of diseases. It’s not one single gene mutation that causes all of them that you could just find and fix forever. Usually it requires many mutations for a cell to become cancerous, so curing cancer is basically like playing whack-a-mole.
Cancer is still your own body’s tissues, so often the hardest part of developing treatments is finding something that will kill the cancer without fucking up everything else. Like, sure, sodium hydroxide kills cancer but we’re not going to just start injecting it into people’s veins.
I think fire kills cancer too.
Every cancer is its own thing much like every virus and bacteria is its own thing. There have been massive advancements and many people survive cancer now. crispr and mrna vaccines have the potential to come closer to a general cure but it would be somewhat like the flu vaccine where there would be multiple types and updates and stuff I think.
You should look into the cancer vaccine.
Basically it’s a therapeutic vaccine (like rabies vax, it’s given after you’ve got the problem), that tells your body that specific cancer cells are foreign invaders. I don’t know a whole lot about it, and my info is somewhat outdated, so I’ll be reviewing the info I’m linking more closely when I have more time. There are also some prophylactic, or preventative, like the HPV vax, which is obviously the end goal but not necessarily possible for all cancers.
It is still in progress, and often, from what I understand, needs to be made for each patient and the specific cancer cells they are growing, but if it works for wherever they try it on, there’s your cure.
Below you’ll find some citations but bear in mind this is a pretty new development.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11834487/
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunotherapy/cancer-treatment-vaccines