[ekianjo]

> What's really sad is that the state of progress in cancer treatment is extremely slow.

This is massively false. There are great strides made for numerous cancers, while for some others (pancreatic, colorectal being among the worst) there are still not many good options. For pancreatic cancer the main issue is that it's very hard to detect in early stages and when you get the symptoms you are basically already in stage IV. Pretty much the same story for brain tumors (like GBM, usually detected very late).

We also know a lot more about how to prevent many types of cancer. If you want to reduce significantly the odds of stomach cancer, you basically need to really restrict your alcohol consumption. Even for many cancers alcohol consumption shows up as correlated with increased risks.

So, treatments are improving, prevention is improving, but of course there are still cancers with very poor outcomes. At the same time, it's a major field of investment so many companies are trying to make odds better every day.

[intrasight]

If early detection can make a big difference, then clearly that is the low hanging fruit of cancer research.

[robryk]

This would require a test that is (a) cheap (so that it can be applied to basically everyone) and (b) has extremely low false positive ratio (because a particular kind of cancer is a rare thing). Repeat for every different kind of cancer.

For these reasons I'm not sure that it'll end up being a lower hanging fruit than vastly better treatment of late detected cancer for the kinds that are usually detected very late now.

[ekianjo]

It's not that they are not trying. There are numerous studies looking for bio-markers to detect the presence of cancer, but from what I remember, it does not yield good results.