When President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1972, he didn’t think it would take forty years to get a handle on how cancer works and what we could really do about it. We are finally getting there.
The big news is the explosion of new treatments based on the subtle molecular differences between cancer and normal surrounding tissue. Small changes in the base sequences in DNA, the building blocks of genes, result in genetic mutations which allow the cancer to grow unchecked by normal growth feedback mechanisms. That much has been known for a long time. What is new is the ability of scientists to take advantage of those mutations to create new drugs which attack only the abnormal cells – so-called targeted therapy.