This just goes to show how difficult a problem cancer is. These companies were working on therapies for cancer, switched direction and in 11 months developed and successfully tested a vaccine against a newish virus. What's the progress in cancer treatment in those 11 months with vastly larger resources? Is there even a 1% improvement in survival across all cancer types compared to last year?
Consider that you can quickly get 30,000 people to sign up for a trial (which is what I saw as the AstroZeneca trial size) but you really have to work to get a sufficient sample size for the right kind of cancer.
Oncology trials can take years. On top of that, teams threw their entire effort into a single vaccine because billions of people will need it, and they may need it multiple times depending on how this vaccine goes. Cancer drugs are often for one type of cancer, which has fewer people and thus less priority.
If 7 billion people were at risk of developing one type of cancer, I think we'd have a better chance at developing it. Cancer is hard but that's not the only reason it's slow.
In a limited US-centric look, it seems like the resources are at about the same level, with funding for cancer at ~$5.6 billion for the NCI[0], and ~3.6 billion for COVID19[1] (in June, not sure if more funding has been approved since).
Not sure what metric you want to consider for cancer survival, but the rough trend in 5-year cancer survival seems to be in the ballpark of improving between 0.25-1% yearly (until 2013)[2].
Ah yes, you're right. I just couldn't believe the number is that low since it looks so big from the inside (AACR had like 100k attendees). Especially when you compare this number to tech acquisitions...
Cancer, as a whole, has gotten way more money than Covid has. Half of all biotech VC money was going into cancer. No to mention big pharma's R&D budgets are heavily focused on cancer.
Cancer and heart disease each killed more people than Covid this year. But a working covid vaccine a lot easier to produce (this is something I'm saying on hindsight - 6 months ago I wouldn't have been so confident in the ease).
I have hope that the mRNA based vaccines will enable economies of scale and provide insights into delivery mechanism and safety which will then in turn speed up the development of cancer treatments.
