I used to say that but there are some promising anti-CD47 ideas that might have a chance of knocking out large swaths of tumors. I can also imagine a 'solution' where you biopsy the cancer and look for highly expressed abnormal cell surface markers and use that to target an antibody-directed warhead to the cancer (I'm interested in turning that into a reality sometime in the future, if you'd like to know more contact me, info's in the profile).
There's the SENS approach, which is radical and based on present knowledge will absolutely prevent all cancer by striking at the one mechanism that all cancer needs. That comes with a hefty side-order of required advances in stem cell medicine in order to keep things going without said mechanism, however:
The SENS Research Foundation is entirely supported by charitable donations.
If you want something a little less radical then helping any group working on targeted cell killing technologies is more useful than what you were probably going to do with that money otherwise - though of course finding a place to donate that will funnel your funds to this particular research is a challenge. The typical cancer charity is about five levels removed from picking research projects, but one can hope that this will change with the spread of crowdfunding techniques into the sciences. Immune therapies are the front runner technology there, but many other approaches exist (nanoparticles, viruses, bacteria, etc). Some of these approaches seem likely to effectively treat many different types of cancer, such as work on CD47:
Not sure why you got downvoted, it's a very valid comment.
The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.
The biggest issue I think is that cancer is systemic, given a long enough run the way our bodies do their housekeeping cancer is pretty much a 100% certainty. It's like playing the lottery, if you play long enough one day you'll win, only in this case you lose.
By far the larger part of the fatalities in my close circle were due to cancer. And I fear that this will remain with us as a problem for quite a while. Compared to curing cancer curing world hunger seems to be easy (it requires no unknown technology, nor does it go against the way our bodies appear to function).
> Not sure why you got downvoted, it's a very valid comment.
I think in retrospect that my normal dose of snark, even with the point I was trying to make, was probably not appropriate to the topic at hand. If nothing else it might seem flippant, and while I know that's not what I would mean, that doesn't mean people seeing the comment independently would realize that.
> The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.
If I had a do-over that's probably exactly how I would phrase it instead. Saying we should simply cure cancer, as it were always one massive public project away and just needed political will, just demonstrates an immature understanding of cancer research as it stands today.
Certainly it's a noble goal, but it's seemingly at odds with how biology works in a body in the long run.
