I think this is aggressively wrong. First, chemo, surgery, and radiation have advanced dramatically over the years. Chemo is an umbrella term for quite a lot of treatments and isn’t some single drug like Tylenol.
CAR-T has been effective in treating advanced cancers of certain types and solid tumor CAR-T is advancing fast.
Cancer is probably one of the most complex problems we’ve ever tackled with expectation of success. I think it’s considerably harder than quantum computing or other nascent technologies. Further I think we are building fundamental understandings of life itself that leads to enormous adjacent benefits, most especially in aging and longevity.
It’s also not a single disease. It’s a description of a behavior of cells in the body that leads to certain outcomes. The causes, mechanisms, etc, are all specific to the cell types, of which there are many, the individual, and random chance. That makes the problem domain almost infinitely complex, so finding a way through it is hard already. But add onto it that cancer cells are you eliminating them without eliminating you is absurdly hard, and leaving even a small number behind risks a relapse that is resistant to the prior treatments because a few cells happened to have a random mutation that protected them.
All this said, I think cancer treatment will be a domino effect discovery. We will slog along reading these elusive yet promising articles until one day, we have done enough of the discovery and exploration, and things will be very different very quickly. Similar to AI - I wouldn’t have predicted generative AI would have effectively solved NLP two years ago, despite tons of promising headlines and articles for the last 50 years.
CAR-T has been effective in treating advanced cancers of certain types and solid tumor CAR-T is advancing fast.
Cancer is probably one of the most complex problems we’ve ever tackled with expectation of success. I think it’s considerably harder than quantum computing or other nascent technologies. Further I think we are building fundamental understandings of life itself that leads to enormous adjacent benefits, most especially in aging and longevity.
It’s also not a single disease. It’s a description of a behavior of cells in the body that leads to certain outcomes. The causes, mechanisms, etc, are all specific to the cell types, of which there are many, the individual, and random chance. That makes the problem domain almost infinitely complex, so finding a way through it is hard already. But add onto it that cancer cells are you eliminating them without eliminating you is absurdly hard, and leaving even a small number behind risks a relapse that is resistant to the prior treatments because a few cells happened to have a random mutation that protected them.
All this said, I think cancer treatment will be a domino effect discovery. We will slog along reading these elusive yet promising articles until one day, we have done enough of the discovery and exploration, and things will be very different very quickly. Similar to AI - I wouldn’t have predicted generative AI would have effectively solved NLP two years ago, despite tons of promising headlines and articles for the last 50 years.