[reasonattlm]

Cancer research largely proceeds in the wrong direction, towards ever more personalization to mechanisms specific to one tiny fraction of cancer types, or tiny fraction of tumors in that cancer type. Then people are surprised at the low cost-effectiveness of the expenditure. Which is not to mention that cancers will cheerfully evolve around an attack on any mechanism not vital to their operation.

Insofar as anything needs hacking, it is this wasteful focus in the research community. The research community needs a dramatic refocusing onto mechanisms that cannot be evaded and which occur in most or all cancers. The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening. That can't be evaded, and all cancers do it. Shut these things down and cancer stops. Any cancer, any type, any stage, using exactly the same therapy. Yet the amount of work in this area is tiny in comparison to projects that verge on personalized medicine per tumor.

[azeotropic]

<quote>The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening. That can't be evaded, and all cancers do it.</quote>

Yeah, and so do adult stem cells. As long as your patient doesn't need intestinal walls, skin, or blood, this will be a totally successful treatment!

Have you entertained the hypothesis that people studying cancer might know more about biology than anti-aging cranks?

[tryptophan]

>mechanisms that cannot be evaded and which occur in most or all cancers.

The problem with this is that if something cannot be evaded(is probably "core" to the cell) or occurs in most cancers, it also most likely occurs in healthy cells as well. 10000s of drugs are made each year which kill cancer cells, but the problem is that they are not specific to the cancer and kill everything else too. The holy grail in cancer drug development is to develop a drug that ONLY kills cancer cells and leaves everything else alone. We have yet to make one of these.

>The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening.

Cancer cells do lots of random things. After all, they are just a collection of "bugs" that occurred randomly in such a way that they present symptoms we recognize as cancer. Just because they express telomerase doesn't mean its important. Im sure they express lots of random other things too. "Obvious" solutions like this, have been tested by 100 people by now, and since we haven't heard anything, we can safely assume it doesn't work.

[samus]

While it would surely be nice to have a treatment that works for every type, there are people having cancer now. If there is a treatment for their specific type of cancer, the research has paid off already, even if it is a low-hanging fruit compared to treating cancer in general.

[danharaj]

Are you a cancer researcher?

[rmtech]

I agree with this assessment, and note that the body already has mechanisms to defeat cancer - they're just not gppd enough.