A lot of that "slow progress" is due to the FDA's intransigence and conservatism, even in the face of patients like me who are dying already anyway: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-ce...

See also "The dead and dying at the gates of oncology clinical trials" https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the... and my wife on what trying to enroll in clinical trials is like from the patient's perspective: "Please be dying, but not too quickly: a clinical trial story" https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...

We could and should be moving faster. I'm dying anyway, so if a treatment doesn't work or even harms me, I'm not much worse off than I was before the treatment.

We've made tremendous progress in the last 20-30 years. There are some cancers that *are* effectively curable. And others still vex us just as much as they always have.

I'm not an expert so feel free to correct me, but my understanding is that there are plenty of other animals, such as the naked mole rat, that are effectively immune to all forms of cancer because while it might not technically be one disease, all forms of cancer share enough characteristics that there exist a small group of genes that are able to suppress it or develop an immune response that effectively prevents a tumor from growing.

I'll make an even border generalization. Cancer is one of the hallmarks of aging. And aging itself somewhat loosely defined will include all types of cancer and what are typically regarded as non-cancers, like Alzheimer's.