Comment by himata4113

It's not as great as you might think, despite all the stories you see like this one. That's because most of the stories are in cells (this one) or mice.

The big success story, about 20 years old now, is testicular cancer. You can have metastatic testicular cancer with tumors all over your body (like Lance Armstrong had) and they can cure it. They use platinum based chemotherapy and it's not really well understood why it works for testicular cancer, but not others.

The story with childhood leukemias is similar. They figured out how to combine a bunch of chemotherapy to get the cure rate up pretty high. Leukemia in a child used to be (1990s) 90% fatal, it's like 10% now.

Besides those, most of the advances in the past few decades come from early detection/ surgery or just prevention (stop smoking).

There is some hope though. When people first started studying cancers at the molecular level, one of the first things they noticed was how often a gene called Ras was mutated in different cancers. It turns out that designing a drug for Ras was really hard, but it finally got done, it's called daraxonrasib. They just released phase III human trials with this drug in pancreatic cancer a week or two ago and it destroyed the standard of care (Chemotherapy), but that is saying people who were dying in 1-2 months were still alive after 5-6 months.

The former senator Ben Sasse was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer last December. Historically, that's like 5% survival rate for 5 years. He is on daraxonrasib. We will see how it works out.

It's difficult to do that because we don't even really know how many cancers there are.

Cancer is best understood as a family of tens of thousands of diseases. They're a whole range of different genetic changes that can happen which result in similar categories of symptoms and consequences. They can also be incredibly complex, such as being the result of hundreds of stacking genetic defects acquired over a lifetime. There can be a thousand varieties of one specific type of lung cancer, and they might all react differently. Some of our solutions might work on a lot of them, but others might only work on a handful. And we're at the beginning of figuring all this out.

CRISPR may eventually allow us to genetically profile a cancer and design highly targeted medications to cure them, but we don't know yet how well it will work. It may only work on a portion of them. It may have worse outcomes than chemotherapy or radiation. It's nice to think that we're going to find a magic solution to the entire problem, but things almost never work that way. I think we're going to be able to resolve a wide range of issues, but I don't think it will really cure cancer as a whole.

you should probably look at oncogenes in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncogene

at the simplest level, the particular gene, and particular perturberance, sets the "type" of cancer.

there will most often be additional genetic abnormalities giving nuance to the character of the oncotype.

the tumour is originated from a cell type of specific differentiation, and developmental potency, further widening the pool of possible cancer type.

immunotype of cancer also sets the relationship between cancer and the body.

the cells of the body are setup for a functional death and replacement so when you try to rescue a particular cell [or cohort] you are fighting against how the grand scheme of tissue maintenance operates.

unless you have concern for a particular long lived cell, it is best to destroy the tumour cell, and let the next cells in line replace them.

it is still a multifacet strategy being developed, inhibit the genetic properties of the tumour, and target the immunotype for destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunology

#TIL multiple myeloma went from being a death sentence in the 90's to quite manageable using a really old compound called thalidomide[1]. Though it sad that it was exploited for almost two decades to line the pockets of a dozen rich a*holes.

[1](https://www.propublica.org/podcast/revlimid-cancer-drugs-fda...)

All in all what a century to be alive in, 100 years ago many people were living in mud huts globally (even in rural Europe) and now we have CRISPR, self-driving and hopefully UBI in a few years/decades. So much to look forward to.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but OWID has a bunch of great visualizations about cancer, including ones that really show the progress we've made (and how much we've yet to make!)

https://ourworldindata.org/cancer

Exactly.Now these are the kind of matters the world should be more inclined to invest in.

I think it's difficult to objectively quantify "effectively solved". A good source with loads of information about many diseases and their clinical status is OpenTargets, e.g. https://platform.opentargets.org/disease/EFO_0003860

Let the record reflect that I had this exact idea 2 years ago but never finished it, and remembered it this morning.

> We might have "AI" ...

Basically everything that was invented up to 3 years ago was invented without the help of "AI". And that includes "AI" itself, for we, humans, invented that too.

So yup, humans can be quite resourceful.

The foundational problem with cancer is that multicellular organisms rely on tight control of the cell division cycle and there are hundreds of ways that can go off kilter. The record of understanding and treatment is impressive, certainly, but the correct mental model is more ‘think of all the problems that can go wrong with a rocket launch - from contaminated fuel to software glitches’ than ‘here’s a list of cancers of different cell and organ types’.

Just as attacking such problems with rocket launches involves hundreds of different approaches, that’s the situation for cancer. I’d also point out that this is why it was really not trivial to identify microbial and viral causes of disease in the 19th century - especially since we now know that certain kinds of infectious disease can themselves result in cancer initiation. It’s definitely a hard set of problems.

I would also add, there was a concerted effort by industry to promote ‘inherent genetic malfunction’ as the cause of cancer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the reality is that exposure to industrial carcinogens tracks closely with a wide variety of cancers (skin, digestive tract, etc.). This was a very deceptive and dishonest approach to avoiding regulation.

Have you asked Claude to pull this and graph it over time? It could build a static site as well.