Will We Ever Cure Cancer? How Close Are We?

Cancer has probably touched almost every family in some way. Medical science has made enormous progress against it, yet some forms remain incredibly hard to treat, which raises a deceptively simple question: will we ever cure cancer?

The trouble starts with the word “cancer” itself. It isn’t one disease, but a broad term covering hundreds of different diseases that can behave very differently. Melanoma isn’t the same disease as pancreatic cancer, and even two tumours in the same organ can carry very different genetic changes and respond differently to treatment. That makes a single fix unlikely.

But when I started looking at the evidence, I realised there’s a better question to ask: are more individual cancers becoming preventable, curable or manageable? On that measure, the news is much more encouraging.

Why is cancer so difficult to treat?

Cancer begins when cells pick up changes that let them grow and divide when they shouldn’t. Normally, the body has sophisticated systems to control cell growth, repair damaged DNA and remove abnormal cells, part of the wider balancing act I describe in what is homeostasis?. Cancer develops when enough of those safeguards break down. The problem is that no single genetic mistake lies behind all cancers. Different cancers are driven by different mutations, and even within one tumour there can be groups of cells with slightly different characteristics.

That creates a problem for treatment. A drug might destroy most of the cancer cells while a small group survives because it happens to be resistant, and those survivors can then multiply and bring the disease back. In other words, cancer can change during treatment, which is one reason doctors often combine several treatments or switch when a cancer stops responding.

Cancer isn’t one disease

Imagine replacing the word “cancer” with “infection”. You wouldn’t expect one antibiotic to clear every bacterial infection, because different bacteria behave differently and respond to different medicines. Cancer is even more complicated. There are cancers of the blood, brain, skin, breast, bowel, lung, liver, pancreas and many other tissues, each developing through different biological pathways.

Genetics adds another layer. Two people with what looks like the same cancer can have tumours with very different genetic features, and modern cancer medicine increasingly uses those differences to choose treatment. So the future is unlikely to be one breakthrough drug. It’s far more likely to be many increasingly precise treatments for different cancers and different patients.

We have already changed the odds

It’s easy to underestimate progress by looking only at the cancers that are still extremely hard to treat. Step back and the odds look very different.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), five-year relative survival for all cancers combined in Australia rose from 50% in 1987-1991 to 72% in 2017-2021. The cancer death rate also fell, from 257 to an estimated 194 deaths per 100,000 people between 2000 and 2025. That 72% doesn’t mean 72% of people are cured after five years. As the AIHW explains, five-year relative survival compares people diagnosed with cancer with people of the same age and sex in the general population. It’s still a useful way to see how much outcomes have improved, and how unevenly.

Source: AIHW, Cancer data in Australia. The AIHW published these figures in October 2025.

For prostate and breast cancer, surviving a diagnosis is now the expected outcome for most people. Lung cancer survival has nearly tripled, although it still causes more deaths than any other cancer. And brain cancer has barely moved in three decades, a reminder of how much work remains for the hardest cases.

Some cancers are already highly curable

In cancer medicine, “cure” isn’t an all-or-nothing idea. Some cancers can already be cured in a large proportion of patients, particularly when they’re found and treated before they spread. The AIHW’s Cancer data in Australia report shows five-year survival of over 95% for testicular and thyroid cancers. Many early-stage breast, bowel and skin cancers can also be treated successfully. At the other end of the scale, the same report shows pancreatic cancer and mesothelioma still below 20%.

Doctors also don’t need to prove that every last cancer cell has gone for someone to be considered cancer-free. If the disease doesn’t return over a long enough period, a person may be considered free of it, and for some cancers that’s now routine. The challenge is extending that success to cancers that are harder to detect, spread early or develop resistance to treatment.

Prevention may be more powerful than treatment

There’s another way to beat cancer: stop it from developing in the first place. Not every cancer is preventable. Random DNA changes happen as cells divide, and some people inherit genetic changes that raise their risk. But a significant share of cancers are linked to things that can be changed.

A study led by Brisbane’s Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) Berghofer used 2013 data to estimate that around 38% of cancer deaths in Australia were linked to potentially modifiable risk factors. Smoking accounted for the biggest share, 23% of all cancer deaths. Poor diet, excess body weight, infections, ultraviolet exposure, alcohol and physical inactivity made up much of the rest.

That doesn’t mean someone who develops cancer brought it on themselves. Cancer is complicated, and people who do everything “right” can still develop it. It means that across a whole population, reducing these risks prevents a substantial number of cancers, shifting the odds without promising anything for any one person.

Vaccines can prevent some cancers

A remarkably effective cancer prevention tool isn’t a cancer drug at all, but a vaccine. The human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer as well as several other cancers. In 2007, Australia became one of the first countries to roll out a national HPV vaccination program, using a vaccine developed at the University of Queensland.

Combined with a switch to HPV-based cervical screening, the results have been remarkable. According to a federal government media release, there were no cervical cancer cases diagnosed in women under 25 in 2021, for the first time since records began in 1982. The same release says Australia is on track to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem by 2035.

That target isn’t certain, though. HPV vaccine coverage by age 15 has slipped from 85.7% in 2020 to 79.5% in 2024, and many women are overdue for screening. Still, it’s a powerful reminder that the future of cancer medicine isn’t only about destroying tumours, but also about stopping them from forming.

Screening can save lives too

Finding cancer earlier can dramatically change the options available. A small tumour still confined to where it started may be removed with surgery or treated locally, while the same cancer after it has spread can be much harder to control. That’s why Australia runs national screening programs for bowel, breast and cervical cancer. Screening doesn’t find every cancer, but catching certain cancers early substantially improves the chances of successful treatment.

Treatment has moved beyond chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is still an important treatment, but modern oncology is no longer just about chemicals that kill rapidly dividing cells. Researchers now understand far more about how cancer cells work, and that has opened up several new approaches.

Targeted therapies

Some cancers depend heavily on a particular molecular pathway or mutation. If doctors can identify that change, a targeted drug can interfere with the cancer while causing less damage to normal cells than conventional chemotherapy. That’s why genetic testing of tumours has become so important for some cancers.

Immunotherapy

Your immune system can recognise abnormal cells, including cancer cells, but cancers often find ways to hide from it or switch it off. Checkpoint inhibitors block those molecular “brakes”. The US National Cancer Institute explains how immune checkpoint inhibitors release the immune system so T cells can recognise and attack cancer cells.

For some people with melanoma and certain lung cancers, immunotherapy has produced long-lasting responses that older treatments rarely achieved. It doesn’t work for every cancer or every patient, but it has transformed treatment for some diseases.

CAR-T cell therapy

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, known as CAR-T, takes immune cells from the patient, genetically modifies them in a laboratory so they can recognise particular targets on cancer cells, and returns them to the body. It has produced remarkable results in some blood cancers, including cases where other treatments had stopped working. It has been much harder to use against solid tumours, though, and researchers are still working on how to extend it.

Could personalised cancer vaccines be the next big step?

This is a fast-moving area of research. Instead of one vaccine for everyone, researchers analyse a person’s tumour, identify abnormal proteins unique to that cancer, and design a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognise them.

On 19 August 2026, Merck and Moderna announced that their personalised messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) therapy, intismeran, had succeeded in a phase 3 trial when combined with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda). The trial involved more than 1,100 people with high-risk melanoma that had been surgically removed. Compared with pembrolizumab alone, the combination kept patients free of recurrence for longer and delayed the cancer spreading. As ecancer reported, Professor Georgina Long of Melanoma Institute Australia described it as the first phase 3 study to show that a treatment designed around the unique mutational “fingerprint” of a patient’s own tumour could reduce that risk. The same approach is being tested in lung cancer and other cancers.

There’s an important qualification, though. A positive company-announced phase 3 result isn’t the same as an approved treatment. A peer-reviewed commentary on the announcement notes that the full results still await presentation and peer review, overall survival is still being evaluated, and the treatment has to go through regulatory review before it can become routine care. It’s better seen as a sign of where cancer treatment is heading than as a treatment that’s already available.

Artificial intelligence may help speed things up too. Researchers are using machine learning to analyse medical images, spot patterns in tumour biology and genetic data, and search huge datasets for potential drug targets. It won’t replace oncologists, but combined with better genetic information, imaging and targeted treatments, it could make cancer care far more personalised.

So, will we ever cure cancer?

If you mean one treatment that eliminates every type, that seems unlikely, because there are simply too many different diseases hiding under the one word. But if you mean whether we’ll keep finding effective treatments for individual cancers, prevent more of them, detect them earlier and turn some of today’s deadliest into long-term manageable conditions, that’s already happening.

Survival in Australia has climbed steadily for three decades, some cancers that were once frequently fatal are now usually survived, and cervical cancer is heading towards elimination thanks to vaccination and screening. At the same time, pancreatic cancer, brain cancer and some advanced lung cancers remain hard challenges, and that uneven progress is probably what the future will look like too. (If you’ve ever wondered which kinds of radiation actually raise cancer risk, my post on whether 5G is safe explains the difference.)

There probably won’t be a single day when scientists announce that cancer has been beaten. Instead, there will be hundreds of smaller victories: a vaccine that prevents another cancer, a screening test that catches a tumour earlier, a drug that targets a particular mutation, an immunotherapy that keeps advanced cancer under control, or a personalised treatment that gives someone years they wouldn’t otherwise have had. None of that adds up to beating every cancer, but it would still be an extraordinary change in what a diagnosis means.

Statistics like these describe whole populations, not any one person’s outlook. If something in this article has raised a worry about symptoms, screening or your own risk, your GP is the right person to talk it through with, and Cancer Council’s information and support line is available on 13 11 20.

Sources

• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: Cancer outcomes improving overall (media release, October 2025)
• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: Cancer data in Australia
• QIMR Berghofer: Nearly 40 per cent of cancer deaths are potentially preventable
• Australian Government: Australia on track to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035
• National Cancer Institute: Immune checkpoint inhibitors
• ecancer: Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial of intismeran autogene plus pembrolizumab (August 2026)
• Personalised mRNA therapy for melanoma and the challenge of global implementation (PubMed Central)