We enter the golden age of cancer treatment

At a friend of mine, a melanoma was recently diagnosed, an aggressive form of skin cancer that had spread in her body, including her brain.

Even a decade ago, her cancer would have been essentially terminally and quickly fatal.

However, my friend’s tumors shrink because their immune system attacks the cancer cells wherever they are in their body.

Treatment called immunotherapy leads your own immune system to find and attack cancer cells in all parts of the body that you have spread out.

It is a familiar story about several types of cancer with new treatment classes, which are often based on rapid advances in understanding the genetics of cancer or cancer patients themselves.

The outgoing medical director of the NHS, Sir Stephen Powis, is not wrong: We enter a “golden era” of cancer treatmentIf we don’t already live in it.

Cancer treatment is increasingly personalized for the specific mutations in cancer. Oncologists know their enemy in more detail than ever.

Tools such as AI can search this detail in order to identify new weaknesses in cancer cells and techniques such as gene processing, enables scientists to design impossible new ways to slow them down or to reverse the spread of cancer.

But we also enter a parallel and less gilded era.

Cancer is primarily an aging disease and our population does this quickly.

It is also more common with those who eat and drink too much and train little – most of us – and explain why the cancer rates now, perhaps for the first time in human history, is increasing in younger people.

As Sir Stephen emphasizes, prevention must play an important role in reducing this increasing stress. It already has for some: smoking-related lung cancer is decreased, as is cervical cancer thanks to the HPV vaccination in schools.

But the majority of the cancer species that are associated with poor diet, poor air quality or poverty in general are not.

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We also cannot make sure that everyone benefits from the incredible new treatments and that still come.

While people in the NHS are now diagnosing cancer faster, many start treatment too late. More than 30% of the patients are waiting for more than two months to see an “urgent” transfer from their family doctor (far below the NHS goal, which has not been met since 2015).

The survival of cancer increases, but also the inequality between those who benefit from the latest treatments and those who are not.

The specialist treatment in some parts of Great Britain is far better than other – often in worse places where the cancer rates are higher.

And the latest and best cancer treatments that are largely tailored are always expensive.

This was always a challenge for the NHS and is only becoming more difficult.

While the golden era unfolds, a lot has to be done to avoid another in which cancer treatment becomes a two or even three steady service that only offers the best of a few.