The biggest difference, as of 2015, is that we now have an extremely promising and more coherent research direction in the form of immunotherapy: (1) activating

The biggest difference, as of 2015, is that we now have an extremely promising and more coherent research direction in the form of immunotherapy: (1) activating and disinhibiting adaptive immune cells (2) engineering highly active immune cells that target known tumor markers, and mostly recently, (3) personalized therapeutic vaccination against a patient's specific cancer. The first two approaches have already shown significant improvements in survival for several cancer types and there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of combinations and variations worth trying that might extend efficacy to most cancer types. Specifically, for metastatic melanoma, the "asymptote" of trial survival curves used to be around 0-10% long-term survivors. The first successful immune checkpoint agent, ipilimumab, brought the survival asymptote up to ~15-20%. The next agents, nivolumab & pembrolizumab, brought the survival asymptote up to ~40-60%. The combination of both approaches seems to result in long-term survival for ~60-85% of patients (at the cost of more extreme side effects). That's a tremendous improvement that we've seen over just ~8 years, and in a disease that was previously thought to be intractable.