As always with cancer, the news is mixed.
The good news? Science has made great progress with immunotherapies for skin cancers like melanoma, as well as solid tumors like lung cancer which remains the deadliest cancer in the country.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s Phil Greenberg, MD, president of the American Association for Cancer Research delivered additional good news: research has added years to patients’ lives.
“Progress in cancer research — particularly in the last two decades — has literally been breathtaking,” he said in an AACR video presented at a press briefing Wednesday. “When I started, we treated cancers with what people might call a sledgehammer approach. We’re in an era now where we have drugs that precisely target abnormalities present in a patient’s tumor cell. We’ve introduced an era of precision oncology.”
