Breast cancer (and leukemia, as it affects kids) are proportionally the most funded ones. Rectal cancer (with a similar DALY loss as breast cancer) does not receive nearly as much funding. Lung cancer (which is common and deadly) gets little funding, as we associate it with people taking their own risk with smoking, even though often it is not the case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27023395, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768198436...).
Slight correction. Most lung cancer is due to smoking, although around 5% are not as your links demonstrate. Share of funding in research is hard and does often play on emotions. There is an interesting concept of funding for “orphan drugs/diseases” from governments for diseases so rare they would never get funded at all from private companies. It’s an interesting ethical question whether these should get funded. https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/31/3/164.full.pdf
How do you know the origin of the particle that causes the cancer? Seems like lung cancer is just attributed to smoking when a lung cancer patient has smoked.
Well, if you want to go down the rabbit hole of causation, there is very little you can say definitely, as proving causation is practically impossible. So you can never say what caused any disease. Having said that, most diseases are multifactorial in origin, with cells mostly having multiple insults to lead to cancer- both on an individual cell and cell population basis. For types of cancer associated with smoking (like non adenocarcinomas of the lung), its likely that smoking contributed to at least one of the insults causing a cell to undergo metaplasia/dysplasia or become cancerous, or statistically would be likely to lead to that cancer on a cell population basis.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124435/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411479/
Breast cancer (and leukemia, as it affects kids) are proportionally the most funded ones. Rectal cancer (with a similar DALY loss as breast cancer) does not receive nearly as much funding. Lung cancer (which is common and deadly) gets little funding, as we associate it with people taking their own risk with smoking, even though often it is not the case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27023395, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768198436...).