Blog

Sean Khozin: Are we trapped in a cycle of incremental advances?

Photo of Sean Khozin taken from lifescienceleader.com

Jul 22, 2024, 15:35

Sean Khozin: Are we trapped in a cycle of incremental advances?

Sean Khozin, Chief Executive Officer at CEO Roundtable on Cancer, shared on X:

“At the recent ASCO conference in Chicago, a colleague challenged me to distill the unmet need in advanced cancers into a single sentence. After some reflection, I offered:

‘Despite X being the preferred initial treatment for advanced cancer Y, most patients experience disease progression within a year, leading to complex second-line treatment decisions.’

This narrative, ubiquitous in oncology, reflects both our progress and persistent limitations. Contemplating this familiar storyline, we began to question: Are we trapped in a cycle of incremental advances while the core problem remains unsolved? To truly transform cancer therapies, perhaps we need to fundamentally reimagine our approach.

What if we viewed cancer not as a target to eliminate, but as a complex system to understand and redirect? Could we develop therapies that evolve alongside the disease, adapting to its changes in real-time? Might we draw inspiration from fields like ecology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary biology to craft novel treatment paradigms?

These questions transcend the confines of a single sentence and they encouraged my colleague and I to think beyond our current frameworks, questioning our assumptions, and envisioning a future where our approach to cancer is as adaptable and resilient as the disease itself.

Perhaps our next breakthroughs will come not from refining existing methods, but from radically reframing the nature of the challenge itself.”