alt Hacker NewsPlease tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures” Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself
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Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.
I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years. With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.
CAR T-cell therapies (immunotherapy, tldr priming the immune system to respond)
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/cancer-treat...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.
In addition to the other comment mentioning CAR-T therapies, we also have therapies based on tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2024...
https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000848 (careful: Figure 1 can be very graphical, but it shows the huge positive impact of this therapy)
We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.