I have updated my strategic plan to substantially reduce cancer deaths. The update includes an Executive Summary and expands the discussion of complexity science and how we understand cancer.
This strategic plan proposes a complementary systems based framework for reducing cancer mortality. Rather than searching for a single breakthrough or "silver bullet," it argues that lasting progress will likely arise from integrating many partially effective approaches. These include advances in prevention, early detection, molecular diagnostics, combination therapies, public health, clinical trials and supportive care. The plan also incorporates concepts from complexity science, viewing cancer as a complex adaptive system in which malignant behavior emerges from interactions among genetic alterations, epigenetic regulation, the immune system, metabolism and the tumor microenvironment.
The plan focuses on what needs to be accomplished, even when we do not yet know how to accomplish all of it:
This strategic plan, initially developed in February 2021, proposes a long term strategy to substantially reduce annual cancer deaths in the United States from the 626,140 deaths projected for 2026 to 100,000 per year. Although this goal is intentionally ambitious, history demonstrates that transformative progress often begins with bold objectives. Thus, after over 50 years of fighting the War on Cancer, we need to dare greatly to determine our desired cancer related goals and how we might attain them, even if many steps are unknown. Defining an aspirational destination encourages broader thinking about how it might eventually be achieved.
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