Having worked in Oncology drug development before, I don't waste my time with articles where the headline is "X kills cancer in (mice|cell lines|rats)". We've c

Having worked in Oncology drug development before, I don't waste my time with articles where the headline is "X kills cancer in (mice|cell lines|rats)". We've cured cancer so many times in rodents, if I were a mouse, I'd take up smoking unfiltered Marlboros while working at a nuclear waste disposal site in the Ukraine. The primary reason there are so many false starts in cancer therapy is that there are zero reliable model organisms for doing cancer research. The closest things we have are: cancer cell lines (human cells derived from tumors and coaxed to grow forever in cell culture) and mice (often given tumors by embedding human cancer cell lines). Both of these scenarios are hugely artificial. The cancer cell lines are so mutated and freakish that they grow outside a living organism and replicate forever in culture. So there's always the question when you have something kills them: is it because you're knocking out some basic cancer mechanism? Or instead is it that you're knocking out whatever it is that lets them live on piece of glass? Their DNA is certainly even more messed up than garden variety in vivo human cancer. Mouse models are problematic because the mouse immune system, while similar to humans, is not the same. Plus if you're embedding human cancer cell lines into the mouse to give it cancer, what exactly are you curing? Finally, there is the issue that we know that human cancers are highly tissue-specific. So while we talk about "cancer" as if it's one disease, it's actually a multitude of different diseases with the same rough outward phenotype. This (along with many other factors) is one of the reasons we've gotten really good at breast cancer treatment: many of the modern drugs target a particular feature of breast cancer to shut down tumor cells. But even in that case, there are other varieties of breast cancer where those drugs don't work at all. Long story short: it all sucks a whole lot. This is why there is over a 90% (I forget the exact figure) failure rate of cancer therapies in early clinical trials. There's a huge opportunity for an enterprising biotechnologist/bioengineer to improve that number by even 10%.