Author: OurCrowd

2016 is turning into a year of many changes in science and medicine, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of cancer research. In January, US President Obama announced a “moonshot” for cancer. “Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” he said in his final State of the Union address, pledging to initiate a government-wide push to cure the disease as an analogy of the effort in the 1960s to send a man to the moon. The cancer moonshot is a $1B injection of cash focusing on new approaches. While the announcement of the president’s mission may have been somewhat unexpected, radical advances in science do provide new hope. Traditional approaches to the disease involve three main types of treatment for fighting cancer: surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. But today, cancer treatments are becoming more powerful, less toxic, and increasingly individualized — with researchers enlisting the help of the immune system in the body’s fight against cancer, and the emergence of new clinical trials and therapies. Here are some of today’s...