Yannick Buccella, Gastrointestinal and Molecular Oncologist at City Hospital Zurich, shared a post on X:
“You’ve had cancer dozens of times. Possibly today. You never noticed, because your body keeps winning.
When I tell patients this, I get the same look every time: disbelief.
It’s true though: Cancer isn’t a thing that arrives, it’s no parasites. It’s a process starting constantly, a cell copies DNA wrong, ignores the stop signal and grows. And nearly every time something stops it: the cell kills itself, a neighbor blocks it, an immune cell finds and kills it.
Autopsies prove it: small thyroid cancers in a large share of adults who died of other causes, prostate cancer in many men who died of heart attacks. People died with cancer, not of cancer.
So a cancer that threatens your life won every one of those fights in a row. That’s why it takes decades.
Which is exactly why the best new treatments don’t attack the tumor at all. They go back to the defence that lost and put it back in the fight like checkpoint inhibitors releasing a brake the tumor applied, CAR-T re-engineering your own cells, bispecifics forcing an immune cell onto the target, vaccines teaching your immune system your tumor’s specific flags.
This is why all these treatments have side effects of an overstimulated immune system, not like chemotherapy.”
You can also read: Immunotherapy vs Chemotherapy: Success Rates, Side Effects, Costs Compared
