Why Curing Cancer Is ‘Impossible’
When I was a child, I truly believed that I could cure cancer. Over the years as I pursed this goal through undergrad and grad school, I, like most people who’ve gone down this path, realized just how complicated a cure would be. In time, just like others before me, my focus shifted from researching cures to publishing the next scientific paper because curing cancer was “impossible.”
Anyone who has been in a Ph.D. program knows the feeling. Scientific research, the way it stands right now, all too often feels like a constant game of “spend time doing research on a biological phenomenon of unknown significance, spend double that time getting a paper published on your finding, apply for grants based on that work, get funded and repeat”.
Perhaps it’s a process of natural aging that we go from children overflowing with optimism to the “realists” that many people proclaim themselves to be.
Or maybe we just tell ourselves that because in this world, it’s far easier to be a realist than an idealist.
Thankfully, no one at Freenome has ever been accused of doing things the easy way.
At the Near Future Summit, we pre-viewed one of our first products aimed towards the goal of alleviating age-associated diseases. The TRINITY test looks at three different aspects of the blood-borne genome that allows users to gauge the health of their DNA, in real time, as they age. In a sense, TRINITY shows a user their own ‘genomic narrative’. They will be able to see the extent of damage done to their DNA over time and see what kinds of healthy lifestyle changes will allow them to minimize it.
The system will eventually learn what is “normal” for each individual and may even have the potential to act as an early warning system for “abnormal” conditions in which the genome deviates dramatically from the normal case, such as in cancer.
As therapeutics for cancer and other age-related diseases are developed, we then hope that it will also be able to inform users on which treatment would be most effective for the individual, and guide them along a personalized path through effective therapy, a major focus of our current research. If this sounds like science fiction, it’s because parts of it are. Constant research will be required to develop and enhance TRINITY but our alpha user group, all bold genomics pioneers, have assured us they are passionate to help us solve. At the summit, we got a tremendous response to TRINITY which really, more than anything we said, highlights the most consistent admirable characteristic of those we met at the summit — all being passionate explorers of the possible (with a strong thread of tech-geekery thrown in for good measure!).
Being at the Near Future Summit was, in some ways, the exact opposite experience of that which all too many have with academic research. There were people focused on different areas, varied approaches and unique perspectives, but everyone believed that they could impact the world in a positive and tangible way — and as per its namesake, in the near term, not some distant and hard-to-imagine hazy future.
No one discussed publication records but rather how we can work together to make each project a reality. Whether it was brain-to-brain communication or predicting and overcoming infertility, people were already doing things that most people still believe is science fiction.
To us, the summit was the living embodiment of science fiction merely being near future reality.
Likewise, at Freenome, we believe that provided everyone in the space keeps up the pace of innovating, investing, and delivering, a cure for cancer is merely a near future eventuality. We also recognize of course that Freenome will not be able to solve it alone. Cures for cancer and other age-associated diseases will require breakthroughs in many different fields, of which biology and computational technology (Freenome’s particular focus) are only two of them.
However, with the advent of accessible genomics, immunotherapies, and new initiatives such as the Cancer Moonshot led by Vice President Joe Biden; plus far-thinking organizations like Near Future Summit weighing in to the conversation, it seems that for the first time in human history, tech-enabled multi-disciplinary teams have potential to collaborate to create highly functional solutions. Perhaps cancer can even become ‘a disease people die with, not from’.
Regardless of how the final pieces of the puzzle are solved, I’m thrilled and proud that we, the Freenome team, are playing a role in it. Now, it’s possible that my idealism is just a function of my youth compared to the others in this field and twenty years from now, I’ll once again believe that curing cancer is an insurmountable mountain. But regardless of what happens then, for now, everyone should ask and answer a question that is a non-negotiable prerequisite for joining Freenome’s mission:
“Will you help us cure cancer?”
There’s only one right answer.
To read more work from the Near Future Summit, check out the publication on Medium.
