We Have Come a Long Way

It has been a special honor to serve as editor-in-chief of CURE magazine for the past 18 years. During that time, we have witnessed an accelerating pace of advances in cancer care and the underlying biology that drives it. It was also a privilege to follow the previous and co-founding editor, Kathy LaTour, an informed cancer survivor and wise observer who encouraged those around her to learn, act and collaborate to combine humanity and science to normalize the lives of patients with cancer. It is now my turn to hand over the editorial reins, so I take this opportunity to look back at where we have been and what we have learned, especially how the future might look in this dynamic era.

There have been successive revolutions from the earliest advances in pathology to understand that cancer came from our own cells and later to classify cancers based on the area of the body from where they arose and the accompanying clinical features. Radiation was one of the first tools that brought some relief for select patients, and the advent of chemotherapy was born out of the battlefield where nitrogen mustard, a caustic agent used in combat, was found to be effective for lymphoma and subsequent modifications created our first inventory of chemotherapy agents. Scientific advances have been made in understanding cellular physiology, receptors and aberrations in DNA as the ultimate culprit of almost all cancers.

The genetic basis of cancer and advances in model systems that could mimic cancer in the laboratory provided targets that can be pharmacologically addressed in an explosion of new and successive therapies that were better than their predecessors. That brings us to the modern era, where many patients can expect new drugs to be developed over the course of their disease. The emerging use of artificial intelligence in every aspect of our lives is moving us at warp speed with forecasting the behavior of cancer and helping us decipher the genomic and biochemical intricacies of cancer evolution and optimal methods to arrest the cancer machinery that can make the most difficult cancers more treatable. Importantly, we expect that advances can be made in preventing cancer or detecting it long before it can take hold. We are learning more about lifestyles that can modify the timeline of aging and cancer. Even when cancer is diagnosed at later stages, treatments are being modified to have less harmful effects on the body and spirit. Combining the latest technologies with integrative approaches is making the trek through cancer smoother and less disruptive.

Over the history of CURE magazine, we have come along way, and we will continue to report on the challenges and successes in the accompanying stories that bring to life developing knowledge, along with personal stories and perspectives that can teach, illuminate and inspire.

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