Every few years, the same frustrated question resurfaces: With all the money, technology and brainpower in the world, why haven’t we cured cancer yet? It’s a fair question. We’ve put men on the moon, decoded the human genome and carry supercomputers in our pockets. Surely cancer should be history by now.
The uncomfortable truth is this: cancer isn’t one disease. It’s hundreds of diseases, each behaving differently, mutating constantly and adapting in ways that make it one of the most complex challenges modern medicine has ever faced.
When people talk about “curing cancer,” they often imagine a single breakthrough—a miracle drug or treatment that wipes it out once and for all. But cancer doesn’t work that way. Breast cancer is not lung cancer. Leukemia is not pancreatic cancer. Even two patients with the same diagnosis can respond very differently to the same treatment. Cancer is personal, genetic and, at times, maddeningly unpredictable.
That complexity alone would make a cure difficult. But it is not the only obstacle. Bureaucracy has also played a significant—and often underappreciated—role in slowing progress. This is where actual progress is stalled. Federal agencies, reporting requirements, and the regulatory progress in this writer’s view have made it almost impossible to find a cure. In my mind many of these restrictions must be lifted.
Medical research is governed by layers of regulation, oversight committees, institutional review boards, funding gatekeepers and federal agencies. While many of these safeguards exist to protect patients, they also create delays that can stretch promising discoveries into decade-long approval processes. A treatment that shows real promise in a laboratory may take 10 to 15 years before it ever reaches patients, assuming it survives the maze of paperwork, trials and regulatory hurdles.
Researchers often spend as much time applying for grants, complying with reporting requirements and navigating administrative rules as they do conducting actual science. Innovative ideas can die not because they don’t work, but because they don’t fit neatly into funding criteria or established research models. Risk-taking—the kind that often leads to breakthroughs—is frequently discouraged by systems that reward caution and predictability.
The regulatory process for new cancer drugs is another bottleneck. Clinical trials are expensive, slow and highly controlled. While patient safety must always come first, critics argue that the system sometimes errs too far on the side of delay, keeping potentially life-saving treatments out of reach for patients who have run out of options. Compassionate-use programs exist, but they are often buried under red tape and inconsistent rules.
Then there’s the issue of incentives. Pharmaceutical companies operate within bureaucratic and financial frameworks that don’t always reward cures. Long-term treatments can be more profitable than one-time solutions, and navigating approval systems can discourage smaller companies or independent researchers from entering the field at all.
Cancer also mutates. A treatment that works today may fail tomorrow because surviving cells adapt and become resistant. That’s why cancer care often involves combinations of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and targeted drugs. Doctors aren’t throwing everything at the wall—they’re trying to stay one step ahead of a constantly evolving enemy.
Prevention adds another layer of frustration. Many cancers are linked to smoking, poor diet, inactivity, environmental exposure and delayed screenings. Addressing those risks requires public policy changes, education campaigns and regulatory courage—areas where bureaucracy often moves slowly and cautiously, even when the science is clear.
This saddens me. Thousands die from some form of cancer each year, yet we can’t, as a government or bureaucracy get a handle on all these roadblocks to a cure. I also can’t understand why people continue to smoke knowing it is a death wish.
Perhaps the better question isn’t why cancer hasn’t been cured—but why we expect a single cure at all. The future likely lies in thousands of personalized treatments, faster approval pathways and a system that trusts doctors and patients to make informed decisions sooner rather than later.
Cancer hasn’t been cured yet because it is extraordinarily complex—and because the systems built to manage risk and process innovation often move slower than the disease itself. We need to flip the script and get out in front of the disease.
