World Cancer Research Day: Why Research Matters
This World Cancer Research Day, I have been thinking about the questions that move cancer research forward—and how often the ideas that revolutionize medicine begin by challenging what we think is possible.
Some of the most important advances in oncology began as early signals, hypotheses or ideas that required scientists to keep asking questions, testing assumptions, and following the data. Persistence matters because the need for new treatments remains enormous.
In 2022, an estimated 20 million people worldwide were diagnosed with cancer and 9.7 million died from the disease. About one in five people will develop cancer during their lifetime.1 And as the global population grows and ages, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to reach 35 million by 2050.2
Behind each of those numbers is a person and their family whose lives have been changed by cancer.
Investment in academic and industry research has also changed what a cancer diagnosis can mean. In the United States, the five-year relative survival rate across all cancers has risen from 49% in the mid-1970s to 70% today.3 That progress reflects years of advances in areas including treatment and earlier diagnosis, and each advancement gives us the ability to ask the next question.
Cancer is extraordinarily complex. Even in a single organ, it is not one disease, but many, driven by different biology and capable of changing and adapting over time.
Today, advances across cancer biology, genomics and immunology are allowing researchers to ask big questions that would have been difficult to imagine a generation ago.
What if we can design treatments around the specific characteristics of an individual patient's cancer?
What if we can better harness the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells? Can we intervene earlier, before disease returns?
And could we eventually intercept certain cancers from developing in the first place?
For me, Moderna and Merck’s investigational individualized neoantigen therapy is a powerful example of how an ambitious scientific idea can evolve. In 2016, using mRNA for an individualized therapy was science fiction to me and one that I did not believe could be possible. A decade later, the Phase 2 data in adjuvant melanoma was one of the reasons I joined Moderna. The science had advanced, the evidence had changed and so had my thinking.
Now we are asking another question: could mRNA potentially be used even earlier in the cancer journey? In Lynch syndrome, for example, we are investigating whether an mRNA-based approach could train the immune system to detect and eliminate cells carrying certain abnormal mutations before they grow into tumors. It is early research, but the question itself reflects how far science has come.
That is what keeps me optimistic about cancer research. Progress does not always follow a straight line, and not every idea will work. I have worked on far more immuno-oncology therapies that failed than have succeeded. But every rigorous experiment gives us important new information and sometimes, an idea that once seemed improbable can open a new direction.
None of that progress happens without patients. Participating in clinical research is a deeply personal decision, often made at an extraordinarily difficult time. Every participant helps us understand what works, what does not work, and what questions we should ask next. I am deeply grateful to the patients, investigators, clinicians, scientists, and research teams who make this work possible.
There is still an enormous amount we do not know about cancer. That is not a reason to be discouraged. It is a reason to keep asking questions.
Because the questions we are willing to pursue today may shape what becomes possible for patients tomorrow.
Sources
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), World Health Organization.
Global cancer burden growing, amidst mounting need for services. February 1, 2024. https://www.who.int/news/item/01-02-2024-global-cancer-burden-growing--amidst-mounting-need-for-services
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Global cancer burden in 2022 by world region and human development level.
https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21834
American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures 2026.