The Battle Against Cancer

¿How are we on the fight against cancer?

Cancer is one of the biggest health problems worldwide. It affects more than 8 million people yearly and is the second most important cause of death behind heart disease. But calling cancer a disease, as in one disease, would be an understatement. Cancer is a term englobing dozens of malignancies that are each of them different and extremely complex. So, what progress has been made in the fight against this health treat?

The fact is, we do not yet fully understand cancer, but great advances have been made. It was just until recently that the importance of genetics for these diseases was discovered. Dr Benjamin G. Neel, from the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center expects that we will continue to understand cancer better and, in 20 years, important changes will be made. Cancer will be understood like we understand heart disease now and we will be able to cure it and prevent it in the same way.
Prevention is a very important part of the fight against cancer. Dr. Neel mentions that we now know that the best way to prevent cancer is to avoid smoking, exercising, and not being obese. Obesity is one of the major risk factors for this diseases.

Cancer cannot always be prevented, cures are needed in these cases. Immunotherapy is a type of therapy that promises to be this cure. This has been one of the major progresses being made towards treating these malignancies. Dr. Drew Pardoll, from John Hopkins, says that in the past 8 years, immunotherapy has shown there is not a single type of cancer the body cannot fight. It simply needs the right tools to identify and kill it. The latest advances in medicine for this type of therapy are checkpoint inhibitors and adoptive cell transfer. Dr. Pardoll also says the best is yet to come, in the next years, these new therapies will continue to arise and improve to finally become the cure against cancer.

So, how are we on the fight against cancer? The answer is: losing, but thanks to the research and effort from the past years and the years to come, that may change in the very near future.