I think the problem in the cancer research community is much the same as the one in the aging research community, which is to say pursuing very inefficient stra

I think the problem in the cancer research community is much the same as the one in the aging research community, which is to say pursuing very inefficient strategies. My theory is that the root cause is similar, which is that researchers and funding institutions will follow a path of least resistance that runs as follows: - investigate the biochemistry of the disease state in a fundamental research paradigm, fairly disconnected from incentive to build treatments, and very distant from root causes. They work backwards from the end state. - find new discoveries, 99.9% of which can only lead to marginal strategies, because they are working backwards through proximate causes. If you mess with proximate causes, you are not building cures. - nonetheless, a healthy dose of status arrives from the applicability of findings, so everyone involved is incentivized to oversell applicability. The researchers are usually less guilty, the institutional support network usually much more guilty (but look at David Sinclair as an example of the inverse). - then the institutional funding for translational development, that really has no capacity to judge expectation value, and is staffed by exceedingly conservative people who are not going to get fired for deploying funding in exactly the same way as their predecessor, deploys money towards marginal strategies that really only arose as a form of status signaling. So that something effective happens is entirely a happy accident. As to where most of the blame lies, I'd say the translational research funding institutions. It is their job to pick good projects, and it should be their job to influence earlier parts of the chain towards higher expectation value research and prototyping. Doing that would be vastly cheaper than the present utter waste of value.