Specialists: Have we done enough to tackle cancer?

The number of cancer cases seems to be on the rise across the world, but is there a corresponding improvement in its treatment? Tata Memorial Centre, the country's premier cancer-care hub, located in Parel, has chosen to launch its platinum jubilee celebrations later this week with this scientific query.
Around 1,000 oncologists across the country and the world will attend a three-day conference, titled 'Cancer Research: In Need of Introspection', which begins on Friday. Tata Memorial Hospital was inaugurated on February 28, 1941. "The cancer research landscape globally seems to be dominated by an almost missionary zeal towards unravelling more and more biological (genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, etc) information for every single tumour and therapeutic intervention envisaged around this framework," said an article published in the latest edition of Lancet Oncology to mark platinum jubilee celebrations.
"This research has yielded a very large amount of 'omics' data for practically every cancer type," said one of the authors, Dr Rakesh Jalali, a radiation oncologist at Tata Memorial Hospital. "The initial successes of some targeted therapies (for example, imatinib for a single-mutation driven cancer) led researchers to naively believe that cancer could be conquered after all, and this conquest was only a matter of time."
But as director Dr Rajendra Badwe pointed out, in most cases, research has only managed a 2-3% improvement in overall survival rates. "Technological advances in cancer management for both diagnostics and therapeutics are also growing at a rapid pace. Modern technologies (eg, robotic surgery and proton radiotherapy) are being embraced with enthusiasm, with all centres wanting to adopt new technologies just because the other centre has, disregarding the scientific rigour that they need before adopting them in routine clinical practice," said the Lancet article.
Dr Badwe told TOI, "We need to launch a fact-finding mission. Are we really helping patients, and, if yes, to what extent?" The conference is hence an "honest appraisal" on whether current research and therapeutic strategies are appropriate and whether the resources available are being optimally used in a meaningful way.