Cancer is not a single diseases, it’s many. And yes, many types of cancer can be treated successfully today, people’s lives are saved, and new, functioning drugs are created constantly. Progress is HUGE.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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? There's advances all the time.
Yeah, the last few friends/family I know who were diagnosed with cancer in the 2020's were all treated with the updated standard of care, using drugs/treatments/procedures developed in the previous decade. Even procedures that were developed a while back, like bone marrow transplants to treat leukemia, have been totally transformed to be less invasive, more targeted, more effective. The doctors also tend to choose the treatment based on certain genetic profiles of the patient or the tumor itself, with fewer side effects or higher effectiveness or both.
You probably live in some sort of a bubble as there's news about new medications and treatments more than ever.
I understand that those are meant to maintain it. I meant actually curing all types of cancer as a whole.
That's because cancer is an umbrella term that encompasses tons of diseases. It's not one single gene mutation that causes all of them that you could just find and fix forever. Usually it requires many mutations for a cell to become cancerous, so curing cancer is basically like playing whack-a-mole.
Cancer is still your own body's tissues, so often the hardest part of developing treatments is finding something that will kill the cancer without fucking up everything else. Like, sure, sodium hydroxide kills cancer but we're not going to just start injecting it into people's veins.
I think fire kills cancer too.
To put a slightly different spin on what the other guys said:
Saying "cure all cancer" is like saying "cure all germs". There's just so many kinds and causes. It's not one thing.
Because you don't look for it, you don't find it. Little advancements don't make it to general news outlets. When you hear big news like that doctor that cured pancreatic cancer, you can assume it's being blown out of proportion until proven otherwise.
Every cancer is its own thing much like every virus and bacteria is its own thing. There have been massive advancements and many people survive cancer now. crispr and mrna vaccines have the potential to come closer to a general cure but it would be somewhat like the flu vaccine where there would be multiple types and updates and stuff I think.
Thats what I ment that why we don't just take a shot every year and give our body the juice it needs to minimize all cancers just in case.
So cancer is not like flue its like virus. So its not necessarily impossible but you need a commanality that always works in all cases for the immune system to be trained on and it can't be something that is in regular cells. What becomes problematic is cancer are mutations that cause the out of control growth. Some diseases are misformed proteins that fit into normal protein places. This makes something that attacks it without attacking signs of the normal protein hard. This is just example of how the mechanisms work and why its tough. Now im not sure if crispr may allow for more direct fine tuning of the immune system as we should be able to make more exacting matches than what training it from vaccines do. But that would still be a ways out. For now we are creating vaccines against specific types of cancer and we might be able to make treatments for individuals specific cancer. Personalized medicine. The greatest road block with that will actually be the way we fund medicine. Unfortunately I can see it being like the de vinci robotic surgery things where a company makes a device to analyze a sample and make a custom treatment but its essentially rented to the hospitals who can use it so many times then it goes back for "refurbishment" or such.
You should look into the cancer vaccine.
Basically it’s a therapeutic vaccine (like rabies vax, it’s given after you’ve got the problem), that tells your body that specific cancer cells are foreign invaders. I don’t know a whole lot about it, and my info is somewhat outdated, so I’ll be reviewing the info I’m linking more closely when I have more time. There are also some prophylactic, or preventative, like the HPV vax, which is obviously the end goal but not necessarily possible for all cancers.
It is still in progress, and often, from what I understand, needs to be made for each patient and the specific cancer cells they are growing, but if it works for wherever they try it on, there’s your cure.
Below you’ll find some citations but bear in mind this is a pretty new development.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11834487/
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunotherapy/cancer-treatment-vaccines
Every time you hear that they developed a drug that selectively kills cancer cells in vitro, that's an incremental step. When you hear that someone successfully cured a specific type of cancer in rats, that's an incremental step.