President Barack Obama memorably declared in his final State of the Union address last year that Vice President Joe Biden would lead a presidential Cancer Moonshot Task Force, with the stated goal of making “a decade’s worth of progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer in just 5 years.”
Reason‘s science correspondent Ronald Bailey writes in the February 2017 issue that “progress may happen even faster than that.” Bailey adds:
The most exciting recent therapeutic breakthrough is immunotherapy—a treatment where cancer patients’ immune cells are unleashed as guided missiles to kill their cancer. “It’s actually plausible that in 10 years we’ll have curative therapies for most if not all human cancers,” declared Gary Gilliland, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, at a conference in 2015. The good news is that the cancer moonshot may end up trailing advances that have already taken off.
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