[himata4113]

Does anyone know a website where I can see/read of how many cancers (and their variants) we've effectively solved, have drugs to negate their effects, have experimental drugs for and uncurable cancers? I think that graph would be awe inspiring looking at the past decade of advancements.

What's more crazy is that we're slowly going from millenia, to decades, to likely years in the near future from being presented a biological problem and achieving the next milestone in solving it. We might have "AI", but we also have brilliant minds right now that are speeding up development to a pace that would be unimaginable just few years ago.

[r58lf]

It's not as great as you might think, despite all the stories you see like this one. That's because most of the stories are in cells (this one) or mice.

The big success story, about 20 years old now, is testicular cancer. You can have metastatic testicular cancer with tumors all over your body (like Lance Armstrong had) and they can cure it. They use platinum based chemotherapy and it's not really well understood why it works for testicular cancer, but not others.

The story with childhood leukemias is similar. They figured out how to combine a bunch of chemotherapy to get the cure rate up pretty high. Leukemia in a child used to be (1990s) 90% fatal, it's like 10% now.

Besides those, most of the advances in the past few decades come from early detection/ surgery or just prevention (stop smoking).

There is some hope though. When people first started studying cancers at the molecular level, one of the first things they noticed was how often a gene called Ras was mutated in different cancers. It turns out that designing a drug for Ras was really hard, but it finally got done, it's called daraxonrasib. They just released phase III human trials with this drug in pancreatic cancer a week or two ago and it destroyed the standard of care (Chemotherapy), but that is saying people who were dying in 1-2 months were still alive after 5-6 months.

The former senator Ben Sasse was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer last December. Historically, that's like 5% survival rate for 5 years. He is on daraxonrasib. We will see how it works out.

[unknownfuture]

I wouldn't understate advances in Melanoma treatment. Immunotherapies have absolutely changed the game in that space. It's not a curable cancer (few are) but it's far more treatable.

[liamwire]

Dr. Richard Scolyer was at the forefront of this, and died only recently after a long battle against brain cancer at 59. His open letter is well worth the read.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-08/professor-richard-sco...

[jacinda]

Amen to childhood leukemia rates improving being awe-inspiring. I had a friend I rode the bus with around 2001 who was diagnosed with leukemia and didn't make it. They let us know over the PA system at school. I suspect these days she would have survived.

[vikramkr]

That's understating the progress by a lot - many cancers are a lot more survivable now than previously with better chemo/radio/surgery + immunotherapies + car-t etc etc

[himata4113]

I guess then a graph of deaths from disagnosed cancer at various stages would be just as awe inspiring. I'd settle for that as well.

[zevets]

https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cance...

Page 2 has the figure. Getting people to not smoke has been the most effective treatment in our lifetime.

Public health is a really big deal, and RFK et al are a disaster for the nation.

[golem14]

Well, depending on how cynical you are. I'm sure there are those that are happy to let the 'senecent' people die of cancer and have a younger population and healthier population pyramid.

Getting older, I'm not subscribing to that, but it sometimes feels like the RFKjr -style interventions are calculated. Then again, this theory makes zero sense when dismantling herd status for measles (I don't think 'natural measles survivors' are genetically 'better' than the rest of us)

[bbor]

Wow, I’ve joked about the prospect so frequently that realizing it has a real Twitter subculture hit me hard. Describing people like that… it’s akin to derisively referring to “the dysfunctional” part of society, to pick on my own disability. The parallels to the Nazi’s ableism are pretty hard to ignore :(

But on a lighter note: is there any belief more certain to spoil?? My god. Don’t underestimate the moral worth of futureYou, folks. I guess delighting in their assured regret is a bit of a guilty pleasure, but it helps!

RE:RFK, I think you’re indeed overestimating their intentionality. They intuitively feel that measles wouldn’t affect them because they’re stronger, and would do their best to dance around that belief if pressed beyond their comfort zone of cherry-picked facts.

But really, they’d much prefer to just not think about that part altogether IMO; ‘MAHA’ is much more about hypernaturalism & tradwives than it is about public health. This is all just annoying scaffolding to them.

[consp]

It is always interesting to point out to people claiming it would be better to not cure people that over half of the people in the room would be dead by the age of 5. That likely includes them.

[lobocinza]

Utilitarianism can justify that kind of policy/behavior. It makes economical sense, with your free the burden of society it free resources so people be more productive, afford things, live happier lifes (at least on the material sense), have children.

Though I don't subscribe to utilitarianism or the notion that the value of an human being can be reduced to its economical aspects. It's not my moral compass.

[golem14]

I think humour is the best medicine. EG, why not kill all the poor: https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE

[arbitrarywords]

Looking through that, they seem to leave out what would be the most interesting comparison - expectancy adjusted for stage at detection against time? Edit Claude suggests the problem is bordering on intractable, but table 7 in this link is probably as good as it gets https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...

[himata4113]

Oh wow, not as impressive as I thought, but I guess we are looking at broad categories rather than specific types and variants. But overall the trend is down on ever cancer since around a decade ago. Was expecting a sharper drop around 1-2 decades ago, but things just take time when it comes to experimenting with human lives. Will be interesting to revisit this in another decade when a lot of the treatments finally leave the experimental stage.

[parodysbird]

Unfortunately, we actually don't make the kind of general widely applicable gains in treatment that people believe we have. We're not in a much different place for major cancers than we were 30 years ago, and I don't see much value in assuming we will just suddenly improve.

[FunHearing3443]

They are starting to ship this out across the country. My uncle has pancreatic cancer and is hoping to get a shipment in the next two months. Apparently you discontinue chemo while on it because it’s so unnecessary at that point.

[sydd]

There are lots of other success stories too. For example there is a reason why Keytruda is the most valuable medicine globally -- it does amazing things against melanoma and lung cancer

[liveoneggs]

I think some class of melanomas and small-cell lung cancers went from 6 month survival to now completely "cureable" using immunology drugs

[bglazer]

You’re probably thinking about non-small cell lung cancers. Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is still absolutely devastating. The most progress made on SCLC has just been getting people to stop smoking, as its almost exclusively a smoker’s disease.

Anyways, I studied SCLC in grad school and saw lots of scans of people with tumors from their heads to their feet, and saw the enormous resources dedicated to caring for SCLC patients and to searching for a cure. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly evil the cigarette companies were and still are. They got people (children) addicted knowing what was coming for them, knowing they were killing them in horrific ways. Now we all get to pay for that in funerals and tax dollars.

[da_chicken]

It's difficult to do that because we don't even really know how many cancers there are.

Cancer is best understood as a family of tens of thousands of diseases. They're a whole range of different genetic changes that can happen which result in similar categories of symptoms and consequences. They can also be incredibly complex, such as being the result of hundreds of stacking genetic defects acquired over a lifetime. There can be a thousand varieties of one specific type of lung cancer, and they might all react differently. Some of our solutions might work on a lot of them, but others might only work on a handful. And we're at the beginning of figuring all this out.

CRISPR may eventually allow us to genetically profile a cancer and design highly targeted medications to cure them, but we don't know yet how well it will work. It may only work on a portion of them. It may have worse outcomes than chemotherapy or radiation. It's nice to think that we're going to find a magic solution to the entire problem, but things almost never work that way. I think we're going to be able to resolve a wide range of issues, but I don't think it will really cure cancer as a whole.

[mhb]

> Cancer is best understood as a family of tens of thousands of diseases

There's a site that lists the AWS instance types, so maybe...

[rolph]

you should probably look at oncogenes in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncogene

at the simplest level, the particular gene, and particular perturberance, sets the "type" of cancer.

there will most often be additional genetic abnormalities giving nuance to the character of the oncotype.

the tumour is originated from a cell type of specific differentiation, and developmental potency, further widening the pool of possible cancer type.

immunotype of cancer also sets the relationship between cancer and the body.

the cells of the body are setup for a functional death and replacement so when you try to rescue a particular cell [or cohort] you are fighting against how the grand scheme of tissue maintenance operates.

unless you have concern for a particular long lived cell, it is best to destroy the tumour cell, and let the next cells in line replace them.

it is still a multifacet strategy being developed, inhibit the genetic properties of the tumour, and target the immunotype for destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunology

[flexagoon]

Not exactly what you're looking for, but OWID has a bunch of great visualizations about cancer, including ones that really show the progress we've made (and how much we've yet to make!)

https://ourworldindata.org/cancer

[ricardobayes]

All in all what a century to be alive in, 100 years ago many people were living in mud huts globally (even in rural Europe) and now we have CRISPR, self-driving and hopefully UBI in a few years/decades. So much to look forward to.

[TacticalCoder]

> We might have "AI" ...

Basically everything that was invented up to 3 years ago was invented without the help of "AI". And that includes "AI" itself, for we, humans, invented that too.

So yup, humans can be quite resourceful.

[itissid]

#TIL multiple myeloma went from being a death sentence in the 90's to quite manageable using a really old compound called thalidomide[1]. Though it sad that it was exploited for almost two decades to line the pockets of a dozen rich a*holes.

[1](https://www.propublica.org/podcast/revlimid-cancer-drugs-fda...)

[aquafox]

I think it's difficult to objectively quantify "effectively solved". A good source with loads of information about many diseases and their clinical status is OpenTargets, e.g. https://platform.opentargets.org/disease/EFO_0003860

[photochemsyn]

The foundational problem with cancer is that multicellular organisms rely on tight control of the cell division cycle and there are hundreds of ways that can go off kilter. The record of understanding and treatment is impressive, certainly, but the correct mental model is more ‘think of all the problems that can go wrong with a rocket launch - from contaminated fuel to software glitches’ than ‘here’s a list of cancers of different cell and organ types’.

Just as attacking such problems with rocket launches involves hundreds of different approaches, that’s the situation for cancer. I’d also point out that this is why it was really not trivial to identify microbial and viral causes of disease in the 19th century - especially since we now know that certain kinds of infectious disease can themselves result in cancer initiation. It’s definitely a hard set of problems.

I would also add, there was a concerted effort by industry to promote ‘inherent genetic malfunction’ as the cause of cancer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the reality is that exposure to industrial carcinogens tracks closely with a wide variety of cancers (skin, digestive tract, etc.). This was a very deceptive and dishonest approach to avoiding regulation.

[Luckyemmet]

Exactly.Now these are the kind of matters the world should be more inclined to invest in.

[4k0hz]

Let the record reflect that I had this exact idea 2 years ago but never finished it, and remembered it this morning.

[tyre]

Have you asked Claude to pull this and graph it over time? It could build a static site as well.

[bitmasher9]

Isn’t this likely to lead to inaccurate data? I wouldn’t know enough about the domain to fact-check Claude.

[phyzome]

Have you tried just mashing on the keyboard and seeing if a great comment comes out?