There is a very interesting dynamic at work in medical research strategy where the scientific urge to completely map our biochemistry meets the engineering urge

There is a very interesting dynamic at work in medical research strategy where the scientific urge to completely map our biochemistry meets the engineering urge to make tangible progress in repairing things when they go wrong. The truth of the matter is that most of the mapping of molecular biochemistry being done in this age of enormous datasets and genetics is of very little immediate application. Meanwhile paths that can use what we already know to generate enormous impact on disease get little attention. This is an age of personalized medicine as the mainstream, but really the overwhelming majority of serious disease mechanisms, those that are age-related or infectious, are exactly the same for everyone. Personalized medicine is a wondrous machine for making money by the look of it, but won't deliver on its promises. For example in cancer the best path forward is to turn off telomerase and ALT, preventing telomere lengthening. That will work for all cancers, one type of treatment for every cancer type, and will cost no more to bring to fruition than any one of the recent examples of cancer therapies brought to market. But that gets a fraction of the attention that goes towards mapping every last part of the genetics and cellular biochemistry of cancer. The efforts to create therapies that spin off from that type of mapping work are largely very limited, in that they involve targeting a mechanism or marker very specific to only one or a few of the hundreds of types of cancer, and even those types are capable of evolving away from that marker or mechanism when it is successfully targeted. Cancer is hard because the research and development community largely follows a terrible high level strategy for implementation of therapies, even though in the long term the mapping strategy is exactly what scientists should be doing.