There are more types of cancer than we have organs. The practice of naming cancers after where they are found is maybe a bit misleading. Especially since the aggressive/deadly varieties tend to spread through the body. Some cancers are very treatable at this point. The hard part is usually classifying them correctly and before they do a lot of damage. Breast cancer sounds more specific than it is. The reason it's such a common location for cancer and why it used to be so deadly is that they are connected to the lymphatic system, which how a lot of aggressive cancers spread through your body. Generally very treatable but some varieties still kill young women.
Fun fact, the Pfizer corona vaccine was developed by Turkish-German women who has been working on developing a solution on fighting cancer with basically an mRNA vaccine. She pivoted to tackling corona last year but is looking to get back to tackling cancer. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...
2012 was maybe a bit optimistic but the last year has shown we can get results in under 12 months if the stakes are high enough.
Since outcomes vary so heavily depending on how early cancer is detected I wonder what scope there is for big improvements in testing. National programs for breast/cervical screening do seem to work but they're expensive (although still probably cost effective [0]) and by their nature can't be done very often. Will we ever get to the stage where we will be able to self-administer a test every 6 months to catch these things in the very earliest stages? Or is that just fantasy due to the nature of cancer?
Not a doctor, but from what I've read there are quite a lot of problems in the way:
- Lead time bias. If you discover cancers early and patients survive more, is it because you're treating better or because you discovered (and started counting) earlier?
- False positives and negatives. All tests will have them, and for low prevalence cancers it might mean that testing doesn't give too much information and just increases load on healthcare systems and puts patients through unnecessary tests and procedures.
- Indolent diseases. Extensive testing might discover tumors that don't have symptoms and are not life-threatening, so you might treat people (with the risks associated) that didn't need to be treated.
And that's if the tests themselves can be developed. Apparently there are a lot of types of cancer, each with different markers, behaviors, affecting different cells. It doesn't seem likely that a single test will be able to catch cancer in general.
It is at least partially fantasy. There are a lot of cancers that grow in the body for a while and then just die off without causing any problems. Treating those cancers would be worse then letting them be. Not to mention all the mental baggage of "I have cancer". Then there is the problem of false positives which happen with most tests.
Not all cancers grow fast. I've been told (read I'm not enough of an expert to evaluate the claim though it seems reasonable) there are some cancers that basically everybody has, but they grow so slowly that science won't worry about them until lifespans reach 150.
I forget where I saw it, but it said that the biggest predictor of whether or not you'll get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater the chance you'll get cancer.
Everyone who lives long enough will eventually get some form of cancer due to progressive accumulation of cellular damage. If you perform detailed autopsies of elderly patients who died of other causes you'll usually find some small cancerous tumors. This is one of several reasons why attempts to significantly extend maximum human lifetimes will probably fail.
Significant life extention will start with slowing the biological clock completely. Someone who is 60 will be like someone who is 30 today. If we do this right this include can er. It's not like cancer is a biological imperative.
I don't see any other way we can achieve life extention.
I don't know. I have a friend who has almost no bone in his knee area, something that was only discovered when he broke is leg. The only explanation for that is a cancer the grew for a while then died out. I don't know how common this is, just that I know of one case where it is believed to happen.
There are other cases of cancer going into remission after doctors gave up on any treatment working.
I think that the mRNA vaccines success will lead to a huge influx of universities/investors sponsoring mRNA research and techniques since they see it as something viable now(possibly initially a negative if it means less sharing).
Now combine that with decreasing DNA sequencing costs, it should put us on a path where the feasibility of cancer sequencing as a standard method of _exact_ identification and mRNA treatments targeting those identified exactly becomes standard fare within a few years (even if there probably is a bunch of cancerous mutations the number should be somewhat restricted considering much of the risks are hereditary).
Fun fact, the Pfizer corona vaccine was developed by Turkish-German women who has been working on developing a solution on fighting cancer with basically an mRNA vaccine. She pivoted to tackling corona last year but is looking to get back to tackling cancer. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...
2012 was maybe a bit optimistic but the last year has shown we can get results in under 12 months if the stakes are high enough.