Resources have been the key toward making important discoveries, said Shane Jacobson, the CEO of both the American Cancer Society, which sponsored the event, and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Philanthropic investments and federal government funding, he continued, have allowed scientists and oncologists to make the progress we see today in cancer prevention and treatment.
Cancer is “omnipresent” Jacobson said. In the U.S., one in three men and women will receive a cancer diagnosis sometime during their lives, according to the of an mRNA cancer vaccine that were announced by Moderna and Merck last month—stem from “decades of progress, decades of new knowledge, decades of even failure, and learning from that failure to bring forth these kinds of results,” Jacobson said.
“It used to be maybe on an annual basis we would celebrate something significant, but the innovation is moving so rapidly that these celebrations, these big moments, are now almost on a monthly basis, and we should expect that speed to continue,” he said. But, he added, just as important as these advances is ensuring that everyone is able to access the drugs and therapies they need—”otherwise,” he said, “the innovation falls short of its potential.”
Vaccines and immunotherapy have emerged as powerful tools to fight cancer, said Dr. Andrea Cercek, a gastrointestinal medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was a