PhD candidate in cancer bio, ~decade in biotech. Cancer is an umbrella term for diseases with a shared feature: unchecked proliferation of cells. “Curing” canc

PhD candidate in cancer bio, ~decade in biotech. Cancer is an umbrella term for diseases with a shared feature: unchecked proliferation of cells. “Curing” cancer looks like developing effective therapies to mitigate this cell growth, and is usually specific to the mechanisms that led to this aberrant behavior. Certain cancers share similar driving processes for their growth, or possess features that enable them to be specifically targeted and killed. Much of cancer research focuses on studying these mechanisms and tumor biology; some of this work is translated into drugs and therapies. You can throw money at cancer and have no effect on the disease. But the biosciences are currently experiencing a bit of a technological renaissance, e.g. automation, labs as a service, massive reduced cost of sequencing, ai/ml. I’d say large sums of money aren’t sufficient for effective cancer research, but they are necessary. Hopefully tech brings greater efficiency to the field.