I work in this area. It took time to know what each protein does in a cell (we still dont really understand most of them), it took time to find all the ways th

I work in this area. It took time to know what each protein does in a cell (we still dont really understand most of them), it took time to find all the ways that various cancers use the protein machinery in the cell to their benefit (new ways are still being discovered these days), it took time to think about molecular glues and turn them practical, and it took time to build the right chemistry and then test it (it takes time even after you know all of the previous steps.) It will still take years, possibly over a decade before this particular development can lead to a drug that passes human clinical trials and is eventually approved. It is not the lack of geniuses that slows things down, rather it is the very careful consideration of risks to minimize the loss of human life during experimentation, and the attempt to optimally allocate the resources across too many different challenging problems in order to maximize the long term benefit to society. The true amount of money spent in cancer research is much higher than the $200B over a decade that you mentioned, however the vast majority of it is just capital losses of various companies spent on the tools and research in early stage discovery across tens of thousands of projects, and a separate huge and more obvious chunk goes to attempts and failures at human clinical trials. The cost of drug discovery has stopped increasing exponentially during the last decade but is still pegged at several billion dollars per approved drug without counting costs from competitors who never get anything approved.