Chances are, you or a loved one will develop cancer at some point during your lives. Worldwide, cancer is one of the leading causes of death, with one in six deaths attributable to the disease. There were over 8.8 million cancer-related deaths in 2015 alone, and the number of new cancer cases each year tallies in the tens of millions.
We have state-of-the-art facilities to treat cancer, such as the Rush University Cancer Center in Chicago, which specializes in oncology research, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which ranks as one of the best treatment centers in the United States. We’re also funneling millions of dollars into cancer research, and have known about the disease in some capacity since the days of Hippocrates, stretching back 2300 years.
In that time, we’ve identified and cured countless diseases with much lower risks and mortality rates, so why haven’t we been able to eradicate cancer yet?
What Makes Cancer Unique
There are several reasons why cancer remains such an elusive disease:
1. There are many types of cancer.
First off, cancer isn’t a disease; it’s a collective term for hundreds of diseases. Lung cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and brain cancer, for example, all have different risk factors, pathologies, and symptoms, and must be treated very differently. Even within one “branch” of cancer, there can be dozens to hundreds of different variants. For example, cancer cells are categorized, and certain types (such as cancer “stem” cells) can transform into further different types. This makes it nearly impossible to comprehensively study “cancer” as a whole. Instead, we must divide our focus to each individual iteration of the disease, and attempt to solve those problems one at a time.
2. Carcinogenesis is ridiculously complex.
Carcinogenesis, the mutation of otherwise healthy cells into cancer cells, is an enormously complicated process. There’s no simple trigger point that converts a healthy cell into a cancer cell; even the earliest estimations of the process reduced it to no fewer than six individual steps. Today, thanks to advanced computer models, we know there are hundreds to thousands of different genes collectively responsible for that conversion process, making it extraordinarily hard to understand, prevent, and/or reverse.
3. Cancer is produced from the body’s own cells.
It’s also important to remember that cancer comes from the body’s own cells. Cancerous cells are still part of you–therefore, they are exceedingly hard to target without also targeting other parts of you. Cancer treatments often focus on trying to destroy cancer cells, but in the process, this approach can do more harm than good. The body’s immune system is unable to identify and fight cancer on its own (in many cases), though recent progress has been made in attempting to use the immune system against cancer.
4. There’s no virus or bacteria to target.
Cures and treatments for conventional diseases focus on targeting and exploiting a structural weakness in the prime cause for the disease. For example, with bacterial infections, most antibiotics attempt to puncture the cell’s lining to “kill” the bacterial cell. Since cancer cells aren’t easy to destroy, and don’t share qualities with killable bacteria or viruses, it’s hard to come up with a treatment that eradicates the disease entirely.
5. Individuals respond differently to different treatments.
There are dozens of different cancer treatments already, including radiation therapy, chemotherapy, surgeries, immunotherapy, and stem cell therapy. However, these treatments may have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of tolerance, depending on the individual responding to them. When researchers discover a new potential treatment for a specific type of cancer, it may only be applicable to a portion of cancer sufferers.
Why There Will Never Be a Cure for Cancer
Because these factors can’t be addressed with simple advancements in technology, and because we can’t change the nature of cancer, it’s impossible to ever develop a once-size-fits-all cure for cancer—at least not in the conventional sense.
Is this reason to despair? Not necessarily. Instead of pooling our efforts to “curing” cancer, we’re focusing on “treating” cancer. We’re developing technology that can mitigate the pain and weakness associated with the disease, we’re inventing new treatment options that can potentially help more individuals, and we’re finding new ways to eradicate certain manifestations of the disease.
Cancer mortality rates are falling and life expectancies are rising—and that’s the best we can hope for.