Ask HN: Will cancer treatments likely get better?

2 points by p0pularopinion 1 year ago | 2 comments

Hello HN,

I am an outside observer to the all discussions concerning cancer. I am not a professional in the field, nor am I affected (luckily). But given the relevance of the issue, I am interested in what the future may look like in the field (say, next 20 to 30 years).

In media reporting, there is often a lot of enthusiasm regarding immunotherapy, especially with the mRNA vaccines that gained a lot of relevance during the pandemic. Many outlets were portraying the future of cancer treatments as highly effective, personalized and targeted vaccines. Before that, genetic predispositions seemed to be of huge concern, particularly with breast cancer. From my superficial reading, it also seems like there is a lot of progress in actually understanding were particular types of cancer come from.

I am curious about the opinions of the people in the field. Is there any hope that cancer treatments in the future may be a less gruesome process than todays chemotherapy? Are there any hopes for cancers that are mostly untreatable today (lung cancer, pancreas, mesothelioma)?

curious_curios 1 year ago |

Undoubtedly yes, things will be much better 20-30 years in the future. There still might be several forms of cancer we don’t make much progress on, but there will be some that we completely crush.

The best results are with prevention. Earlier detection results in much easier and efficacious treatment. There are experimental blood and imaging tests covering large swaths of cancers now. There are also several promising vaccines that are eliminating some forms of cancer. For a recent example there’s the HPV one which has made great improvements for a whole generation.

gus_massa 1 year ago | |

The important part is that we are much better 20-30 years in the past. The problem is that there are small improvements here and there, so there is not a big new in the newspaper, just a (few?) more years of life in average.