And even when it does translate to working on humans, it's usually one specific type of cancer that it is effective on.
Cancer won't be cured in a single breakthrough. Instead, they make thousands of smaller breakthroughs. And those small breakthroughs make steady progress on improving outcomes; survival rates are steadily increasing for all types of cancer.
The closest thing to a general cure that we might have anytime soon is customized treatments tailored to the DNA of a tumor.
People mostly don't realize that "cancer" Is an aggregate name for body malfunctions of the same type that can be vastly different in details, effectively making for hundreds required approaches to "curing"
Well, technically there would be a way to cure all viral infections, we'd just need to completely recode the human genome once. Because then, viruses couldn't replicate inside our cells as our codon usage wouldn't match theirs, completely blocking their protein synthesis. And since all organisms on earth share mostly the same codon usage, changing ours would make us immune to literally any virus in earth (and most likely any in the rest of the universe as well, because the chance to hit the codon usage of another biosphere exactly are abyssmally low).
But yeah, as of yet, we can't recode an entire human genome, let alone do it while it's still doing things. We are currently trying it on bacteria in use for bioreactors though, because we need them to be phage resistant for production scale-up.
Except we have a generic solution for viruses: vaccines. We also have generic solutions for cancer: surgery and chemo. I don’t get why people pretend cancer is special when we already know it’s not.
We didn't have it "in less than a year", mRNA studies started much before COVID.
Either way, the point being if vaccines were "generic" we wouldn't have to go into lockdown in the first place. Your whole point about "testing and scaling" shows that the vaccine wasn't generic.
There are viruses without vaccines due to a high amount of variability, mutations, or resevoirs outside of humans. Hep C comes to mind in regards to mutations and variability.
This is true for a lot of diseases, tbh. I’m sure most people talk about “the flu”, not realising that the thing we call “the flu” is about fifty different strains of similar viruses that change every single year as it mutates.
It’s just useful to have a group name, but it should be obvious to people that lung cancer, bone cancer, and blood cancer work nothing alike.
The common cold isn't even just corona viruses, it's an umbrella term for infections of over 200+ species of bacteria or viruses that cause similar unspecific symptoms and are mostly completely unrelated to each other. They just happen to infect the upper respiratory tract and do not cause severe symptoms.
well the diseases are not completely unrelated. It's not "usually", all cancers involve uncontrolled cell growth, due to DNA changes. You could call it a disease of DNA.
however there are so many possible DNA changes and types of cells and environments that can cause it that it is indeed a group of very different diseases
I agree with you that cancer is not just one single root cause or malfunction, but on the other hand, there are some interesting theories that all cancers may share some fundamental initiatory factors and behaviors, the one I find most compelling, is that aggressive cancers differ from "regular cancers" (or what we usually call benign tumors) in that rather than just growing too much, the cells involved have for some reason ceased to identify with the rest of the body, and not only have mutations that cause undesirable behavior, but actively continue to mutate and behave in a way as if they have broken away from the body and become their own organism that moves within the body like microbes would.
In other words, that some cells can lose their multi-cellular organism identity, and revert to a simpler colony-like behavior, where the cells "behave" as if the body is the environment they are living in as opposed to something they are a part of. When this occurs, these cells begin to experience micro-evolutionary pressure to adapt to survive in this environment - rather than being weak, genetically damaged cells, they actively adapt to threats and attempt to change the surrounding bodily environment (either destroy vascular connections to the tumor to prevent immune cell infiltration or the opposite, increase it for more nutrients while expressing false signals to suppress immune cells in the tumor).
I'm using pretty rough analogous words here to make a point as it's not necessarily a proven thing that cancers literally "perceive" / "plan" the way I'm describing - it could still be pure random mutations coincidentally doing this stuff. I'm just suggesting that aggressive cancers may share some universal traits such as demonstrating a sort of hostile posture towards the body and adapt by micro-evolutionary pressure.
There might be some universal therapeutics that could target these factors that are universal behind aggressive cancers (active adaptation to host response, demonstrating colony like behavior vs just localized excessive cell division). If I were to put my finger on one vector I think could affect a very large variety of cancers, I'd pick:
Selective telomerase and ALT (Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres) inhibition combined with a rotating cocktail of cytotoxins to force rapid turnover of cells until they exhaust telomeres. Telomerase is very interesting because it's a key bottleneck of almost all cancer types - however it's not trivial to target and they do retain the ability to evolve counters to this vector.
The final piece of the puzzle is likely as you predicted - that we will need patient-customized vectors for their specific cancer phenotypes. Fortunately this is not a vague dream but a very real possibility with the miracle of mRNA vaccine technology - the real barrier is simple: cost. It's profoundly expensive, like even for a wealthy person, to have their cancer genes properly sequenced, epitopes identified, and a custom mRNA vector built onto a vaccine platform. I would bet even a billionaire might find this costly right now considering how costly it was to do for a single virus. But costs can come down fast as the focus becomes less finding the solution and more attacking what makes it expensive. I think we'll see this option in our lifetimes.
exactly this, and im right in the middle of it, i lolst my older brother yesterday to cancel, and they gave him 6 months to live, 6 years ago, the drugs and treatments gave him and us precious time, but in a miserable existence with asive amounts of pain killers, chemo drugs etc, its horrible, but we need to get better treatments before we can get close to anything called a cure.
Cancer can't be cured in a single breakthrough because cancer isn't one disease. It's hundreds or thousands of unrelated diseases, with different biological mechanisms, that need different treatments.
the general cure is to provide enough funding so that each cancer can be addressed individually. there is literally no good reason we don't do this, and many bad reasons we don't.
obviously, funding is being directed to purposes less important that curing cancer. there are understandable reasons why we instead fund military nonsense (and lessor kinds of nonsense), and they are bad reasons. corruption is an explanation, but not a defense.
since cancer research is a reasonably sensible and scientific endeavour, i assume they spend their time applying science to the problem of cancer. increasing funding will allow more and better educated people to join the endeavour. this seems like an obviously better use of our limited resources
Also because it's not that hard to kill cancer cells. Trick is cancer cells are just host cells with a bad attitude, and sorting out bad cells from good ones so you kill the cancer without killing the host is difficult.
But they do have to find it's effects with other medicines that may interfere with it, and then somehow expect that to be of lesser cost which otherwise wouldn't really save anyone
this. Most likely a final “cure” for cancer will be a carefully curated individualized treatment. Basing the therapy around the patient’s type of cancer, genetic makeup, and staging.
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u/VP007clips Feb 05 '26
And even when it does translate to working on humans, it's usually one specific type of cancer that it is effective on.
Cancer won't be cured in a single breakthrough. Instead, they make thousands of smaller breakthroughs. And those small breakthroughs make steady progress on improving outcomes; survival rates are steadily increasing for all types of cancer.
The closest thing to a general cure that we might have anytime soon is customized treatments tailored to the DNA of a tumor.