We have made huge progress in a relatively short amount of time. Cancer has been difficult to cure for three reasons:
- Cancerous cells are very similar to non-cancerous cells, and hard to target without harming the rest of the body
- If one treatment is unsuccessful, cancer can adapt by mutating to bypass your attempt.
- Cancer isn't a single disease. It is thousands of diseases with a similar outcome: uncontrolled growth with invasion. You really have to understand the entire signaling pathway and the various tumor suppressor genes / oncogenes in order to understand all the many ways cell replication can go wrong.
Even within a single classification (say, breast cancer) you have HER2+ breast cancer (which has an overdensity of RTK leading to growth factor independence), estrogen receptor+ breast cancer, and others, all of which require a different treatment approach, and the cancer can adapt by mutating further down the growth factor signaling pathway if you attack it in one place.
- Cancerous cells are very similar to non-cancerous cells, and hard to target without harming the rest of the body
- If one treatment is unsuccessful, cancer can adapt by mutating to bypass your attempt.
- Cancer isn't a single disease. It is thousands of diseases with a similar outcome: uncontrolled growth with invasion. You really have to understand the entire signaling pathway and the various tumor suppressor genes / oncogenes in order to understand all the many ways cell replication can go wrong.
Even within a single classification (say, breast cancer) you have HER2+ breast cancer (which has an overdensity of RTK leading to growth factor independence), estrogen receptor+ breast cancer, and others, all of which require a different treatment approach, and the cancer can adapt by mutating further down the growth factor signaling pathway if you attack it in one place.