Can large sums of money help advance the cure to cancer?

PhD candidate in cancer bio, ~decade in biotech.

Cancer is an umbrella term for diseases with a shared feature: unchecked proliferation of cells. “Curing” cancer looks like developing effective therapies to mitigate this cell growth, and is usually specific to the mechanisms that led to this aberrant behavior.

Certain cancers share similar driving processes for their growth, or possess features that enable them to be specifically targeted and killed. Much of cancer research focuses on studying these mechanisms and tumor biology; some of this work is translated into drugs and therapies.

You can throw money at cancer and have no effect on the disease. But the biosciences are currently experiencing a bit of a technological renaissance, e.g. automation, labs as a service, massive reduced cost of sequencing, ai/ml.

I’d say large sums of money aren’t sufficient for effective cancer research, but they are necessary. Hopefully tech brings greater efficiency to the field.

I am a medical student and biotech researcher. My lab does cancer diagnostics.

In a certain sense, money can be used to solve all solvable problems since it buys people's time and expertise. In that sense, your question can be rephrased as "Will cancer ever eventually be cured?" The answer to that question is likely yes. Cancer is a group of diseases that one-by-one are indeed being "cured". The low-hanging fruits are exhausted, yes, but one day there is no reason to think that with enough research in gene editing we can't cure every cancer we detect. The time in years it will take to reach that point will be shortened monotonically with the amount of money spent on it. Although my personal guess is that the money required will be astronomical.

A more interesting question is whether large sums of money are best earmarked only for cancer or for general basic science. This was the fundamental debate between Sidney Farber (who wanted a "Manhattan Project" for cancer) and Vannevar Bush (who wanted more funding to basic science) [0]. There are whole books written about this debate, and from my experience I believe that true breakthroughs come when people are thinking multi-disciplinary and creatively, which means funding basic science not earmarked only for cancer. A good recent example of this is AlphaFold, which came from an unrelated field (deep learning) and is being used by my friends and lab-mates today for cancer research.

Refs [0] - https://erenow.net/common/the-emperor-of-all-maladies/3.php

I have a ‘rare’ blood cancer. It almost killed me in 2021. There are treatments but no cures. It will eventually kill me over the five to 10 years.

I’ve had some innovative treatments such as autologous stem cell transplant, been part of a phase one clinical trial so that my data may help others one day and lastly offered blood and tissue samples for study.

These treatments and studies don’t come cheaply. So, yeah more money results in better treatments and research as far as I am concerned.

I am a scientist (Systems and AI) and unfortunately had to learn a lot about cancer due to it striking a parent recently.

Cancer is certainly an umbrella term and a complex disease. Here is a ELI5 explanation I thought was very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tzaWOdvGMw

Personal Tirade: I am extremely disappointed how stupid medical research is .. trying to uphold the scientific method in the face of a near and certain death. It is all being done wrong and wasteful. I found papers from the 80s and 90s from physicians complaining about the same thing. If things go the way they are, we are not curing any significant form of cancer in my lifetime. Btw .. the fast-track of vaccines during covid shows there are scientifically rigorous ways of doing things fast. But the people who run the show .. I am not even convinced they are motivated to solve the problem expediently. We should be (A) sequencing cancer cells like crazy and (B) tracking patient histories. No matter where people live in the world. The data is GOLD.

My parent has a "rare" cancer .. but the definition of "rare" seems unquantifiable. If I was running the show, I'd sequence the heck of the cells for EVERY cancer patient, and throwing modern computing at it. As for therapeutics, we should be paralleling treatments and composing treatments. I have some doctors in the family who tell me since we are dealing with human beings, we can't be reckless. But what is the point being conservative when someone has 6 months or less to live? We need to move fast and break things .. at least we bloody tried.

I have such mixed feelings about cancer research. I don't often share this, because gifting cancer non-profits with lots of money is considered heroism of the first order in our society. When I read of these large gifts, I can't help but think about a purely economical model of human generosity. How many lives will be saved with this large gift, vs. how many lives could be saved in the developing world with the same amount of money? It makes me cringe every time to think that all lives are not valued equally. Otherwise the gifting of large sums of money to possibly save people at some point in the future, who have enough money to afford expensive cancer treatment vs. definitely, absolutely right now saving large numbers of people who have no potable water, little sanitation and need basic care like vaccines and public health education.

How are you going to find the cure to cancer without great researchers and high quality equipment?