2 ms·
Many anti-cancer drugs target cell division, or DNA replication, or something along those lines. It wouldn't be surprising that the same agents are used against
by Delk 6y ago
Many anti-cancer drugs target cell division, or DNA replication, or something along those lines. It wouldn't be surprising that the same agents are used against different kinds of cancers (which consist of different kinds of cells/tissue), since the common factor in all kinds of cancer is uncontrolled growth.
The drugs might still be more effective against one type of cancer than against another for whatever reasons. I'm not knowledgeable of those reasons, but a bit of research might tell something about them.
Chemotherapy drugs have hiked cure rates for testicular cancer to somewhere around 90%. I think I've read that it was somewhere around 50% before the discovery of those drugs in the 1960's or 1970's. The same combinations of drugs (or some of the same drugs combined with something else) are also used for other kinds of cancer, such as ovarian or cervical cancer if my memory serves. Yet those drugs or drug combinations still aren't quite as effective against those other types of cancer as they are against testicular cancer. That's probably just a matter of them happening to work well against some specific kinds of neoplasms, not a matter of what anybody wants them to work against.
You may be right that some types of cancer get more attention because they primarily affect intimate organs, and thus provoke stronger emotions. However, for example the chemotherapy that's still used for testicular cancer was discovered decades ago, and probably has nothing to do with any kind of identity politics. TC is also rare enough that it's probably off most people's radars, and the reason it's got a ~90% cure rate is probably just that a treatment was discovered that happens to work against it.
While emotional reasons may certainly direct the general interest towards particular kinds of cancer, I disagree with your general notion that a cure for a particular kind of cancer would be for some reason less likely than a general one. On the contrary, finding a specific drug (or having a general drug work better against one or a few types of cancer than others) would be much more likely than a cure-all. There's even an example of the former, and it's not because of present-day identity politics.