Medicine has learned well how to reduce deaths from heart disease and strokes, but it has not yet been able to defeat cancer. Despite the ongoing four decades and already costing hundreds of billions of dollars against the disease, in America alone 1.7 million people are diagnosed with cancer every year, and 600,000 people die from it every year. So why can't cancer be cured?
The main reason is that we have little understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms that underlie it. The first drugs for cancer - drugs for chemotherapy - appeared after the Second World War, when it became clear that the number of leukocytes in the blood of people exposed to nitrogen mustard gas - a substance related to mustard gas - was significantly reduced. The researchers wondered if this would help keep the growth of rapidly dividing cells - including cancer cells. Thus began the era of the search for chemical compounds capable of killing tumors. However, although scientists have often managed to create drugs that act on neoplasms, this did not help to find out the causes of cancer or understand why drugs often worked only temporarily.
Since then, science has made significant progress. Thanks to the advances in cell biology and genetics, more and more types of targeted therapies are now emerging, oriented at the molecular level to recognize the specific characteristics of cancer cells. When combined with chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy, these methods - used alone or in combination - provide a slow but steady increase in survival. Children's and breast cancers are now cured much more often than before. However, there is still a lot of work ahead - including for researchers. Some of the most effective new therapies have come about because we have a better understanding of how cancer cells mutate and keep the body from getting rid of itself. Currently, cancer is perceived not so much as a disease of a specific organ,how much like a molecular mechanism generated by the mutation of certain genes. This shift in the perception of cancer has led to the fact that a method developed for use against tumors in other parts of the body, for example, in the mammary glands, can now be used to treat, say, colon cancer.
The so-called immunotherapy, which mobilizes the resources of the body's immune system to fight tumors, also looks very promising. Ongoing trials show that it causes long-term remissions in patients with difficult-to-treat cancer in one third of cases. In addition, doctors are actively trying to study and predict how certain tumors will respond to certain types of treatment. The world has not yet learned how to defeat many of the types of cancer. However, now is the era of personalized medicine, and thanks to that, in the next five or ten years, we may be able to make significant progress in the area of cancer survival.