National Cancer Week: will we ever be able to beat this disease?

National Cancer Week started this Monday. Over the last 20 years, there has been a lot of progress in treatments, yet today the disease kills 160,000 people each year in France and 9.7 million worldwide. It is the leading cause of death in men and the second in women. Faced with this sad observation, a question arises: will we be able to cure all cancers one day? The answer is yes, according to Steven Le Gouill, director of the Institut Curie hospital complex, who answers without hesitation. “I think that one day, we will be able to make all cancers curable,” he told Europe 1.

If the hematology professor is so optimistic, it is thanks to the progress made over the last 10 years. Research is progressing greatly, particularly on immunotherapy which has saved thousands of patients who were thought to be doomed. “We are now able to manipulate the immune system to make it capable of recognizing and destroying tumor cells,” he explains.

Artificial intelligence, a new weapon against cancer

Hope also rests on artificial intelligence. For example, at the Curie Institute, biopsies are analyzed ten times faster than under a microscope thanks to AI. Furthermore, future innovations will make it possible to tell whether a treatment is effective in a patient, even before administering it. “More and more treatments are arriving. The idea is to be able to do tests using the patient’s cells in culture in order to be able to analyze mutations by modeling them in a computer to choose a treatment that will be optimal,” maintains the teacher. This major breakthrough should arrive in the next few years in cancer centers.