The December 2008 issue of Wired magazine has a front-cover story about Why Early Detection Is the Best Way to Beat Cancer. It covers the work being done at the Canary Foundation with the single goal of devising a battery of screening tests for early detection, arguing that survival rates are much higher when the Cancer is detected early rather than in later-stages.
The US spends billions of dollars to save these late-stage patients, trying to devise better drugs and chemotherapies that might kill a cancer at its strongest. This cure-driven approach has dominated the research since Richard Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. But it has yielded meager results: The overall cancer mortality rate in the US has fallen by a scant 8 percent since 1975. (Heart disease deaths, by comparison, have dropped by nearly 60 percent in that period.)
Despite that, "the National Cancer Institute spent just 8 percent of its 2007 budget, less than $400 million, on detection and diagnosis research."
