Winning the War on Cancer, One Step at a Time

TAIPEI, TAIWAN, Sep. 3rd, 2025- When U.S. President Richard Nixon launched the so-called “war on cancer” in 1971, optimism was high that a decisive cure would soon follow. The moon landing had just demonstrated what large-scale science and government coordination could achieve. Yet cancer proved to be far more complex. It is not a single disease but a vast collection of conditions, each driven by different genetic and environmental factors. More than fifty years later, cancer continues to exact a heavy toll, but the evidence now shows that this long campaign is yielding substantial and durable progress.

In wealthy countries, half of men and one-third of women will experience cancer during their lifetimes. It remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for roughly 600,000 deaths annually, and worldwide it accounts for one in six deaths. Judged against the initial ambition of finding a cure within a decade, the effort might appear a failure. Yet age-adjusted mortality data tells a different story: since the early 1990s, cancer death rates in developed countries have declined steadily year after year. In the U.S. they are now nearly one-third lower than at their peak, representing millions of lives extended.

This improvement has come not from a single breakthrough but from a cumulative series of advances—better screening, more precise surgery, improved drug therapies, and refinements in radiation techniques. Childhood leukaemia, once almost uniformly fatal, now has survival rates above 90%, exemplifying how incremental advances translate into transformative outcomes.

Prevention has been the most overlooked success. Smoking, long the leading cause of preventable cancer deaths, has declined sharply in many high-income countries, averting millions of cases. In the U.S. alone, falling tobacco use is estimated to have prevented more than 3 million deaths since the mid-1970s. Extending such anti-smoking initiatives to low- and middle-income countries, where smoking remains widespread, could produce enormous additional benefits.

Vaccination offers another powerful tool. Cervical cancer, almost entirely attributable to persistent infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV), has seen dramatic declines where HPV vaccines have been widely deployed. In Britain, rates of cervical cancer in women in their 20s have fallen by 90% since the programme began in 2008. With lower-cost vaccines now available in India and other countries, the prospect of near elimination of cervical cancer within the next two decades is increasingly realistic.

Looking forward, progress will increasingly depend on precision prevention and personalized medicine. Large-scale genetic studies are clarifying how inherited variants, such as mutations in BRCA genes, elevate risk. At the same time, researchers are identifying why only some pre-cancerous lesions become malignant. Biobanks and advanced genomic tools now make it possible to track subtle molecular changes, enabling earlier detection through blood or breath biomarkers.

On the therapeutic side, the traditional triad of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy is being complemented by innovative approaches. Low-cost drugs such as aspirin and metformin have shown promise as preventive or recurrence-reducing agents. Immunotherapy—harnessing the immune system to attack tumours—has advanced from experimental to mainstream, with vaccines for breast and colon cancers currently in clinical trials.

Challenges remain: treatments are expensive, side effects can be severe, and access is unequal between rich and poor regions. Nonetheless, the trajectory is unmistakable. What began as a hoped-for blitzkrieg against a single enemy has become a slow but steady campaign of attrition. And in that campaign, humanity is finally gaining the upper hand.

Reference:

[1] The world is winning the war on cancer

[2] Enrolling the immune system in the fight against cancer

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