Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee breaks down the progress we’ve made in screening and treatment — and why more funding is needed to reach the next big breakthrough.
Back when Elizabeth Jaffee, MD, joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of oncology over 30 years ago, the field of cancer research looked a lot different.
“In 1990, if you had metastatic breast cancer, I had two chemotherapies to treat you with, and I would have to tell you that you had a year left to live,” she says. “Today, obviously that’s not the case. We have so many therapies for breast cancer and people live years or decades with it.”
“That’s just one example,” Dr. Jaffee tells us. “We’ve also made huge advancements in genetic technologies, but even in 2008 I couldn’t take a biopsy from a patient, sequence it, and tell them their tumor expresses certain proteins and that they would benefit from these drugs. Fast forward a decade, and we can do all that within a week and a half.”
Scientists like Dr. Jaffee have made great strides in developing new screening techniques, new drugs, and treatment options that have saved millions of lives. To mark World Cancer Research Day, we spoke to Dr. Jaffee, a leading researcher in cancer immunotherapy who now leads President Biden’s cancer panel, about the promise of A.I., the cutting-edge tools on the horizon that could save millions, and the desperate need for more funding.
Katie Couric Media: In your view, what more can be done to boost research?
Dr. Jaffee: Right now, funding to the National Cancer Institute is going down, not up. The NCI, the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, all these agencies that are key in developing new drugs and getting them approved usually suffer when Congress fights over the debt ceiling. From what we’re hearing, the outlook doesn’t look good for at least the next couple of years. That’s really going to slow the great progress we’ve been making. Currently, only 8 percent of federal grant money is going toward cancer research — that’s just ridiculous. We need to make sure that the funding is there.
Are there specific areas of research that you think are particularly neglected when it comes to funding and resources?
When I was on the National Cancer Advisory Board, we identified 10 priorities that the NCI should fund. These included things like pediatric cancers, rare cancers like glioblastoma, pancreatic cancer, some forms of leukemia, and ovarian cancer — diseases that don’t get a lot of funding because they’re not that common but are very deadly.
Screening is another area that needs more attention. We have certain tests for early detection, but not for catching something before it develops into cancer. To be able to do that, our technologies really need to get better.
What role do you think AI will play in moving cancer research forward?
What we need to do is take all this data we’re generating and use it to start to predict who has a chance of developing cancer. In the past 5 to 10 years, there’s been a big effort to bring computational biologists and applied mathematicians into our field to help do just that. The hope is that with these algorithms, I can give a patient a blood test, plug the results into a program, and it’ll be able to tell me that in five years this person could get pancreatic cancer if something isn’t done. We’re just starting to do this now; it’s very early. I would say this is what it’s gonna look like maybe 40 years from now.
What have been some of the most promising breakthroughs in the field over the past few years?
One area has been targeted therapy. We now have drugs that actually target specific oncogenes, such as mutated KRAS in lung cancer. It took decades of research to get to this point and this is revolutionizing treatment for other cancers too.
We’re making progress when it comes to CAR T-cell therapies, but those are more niche and don’t help as many patients as we’d like. And I think that we’re going to see growth in cancer vaccines.
What kind of advancements do you think we can look forward to in the near future?
From a therapeutic point of view, I think we’ll see more targeted therapies that are going to work for patients. Take lung cancer, for instance. Ten years ago, we thought lung cancer was one disease; now we know that there are at least five different genetic forms of lung cancer, and we have drugs that target all of them. They don’t work long-term yet, but in 5 to 10 years, I suspect they will.
What about even further down the road, 30 or 50 years from now? Do you think we’ll ever find an out-and-out cure?
I don’t think there’s gonna be one magic bullet for cancer, but my hope is that we’ll be able to detect what someone is predisposed to and be able to intervene before it becomes a cancer. It could be that vaccinations are a part of that, similar to the HPV vaccine, which can prevent some lethal cancers. It’s really hard to predict, but I do think we’ll make a lot of progress.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
