TV special | Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies | March 30 2015

The PBS website has the full episodes of "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies", for free!

If you're in a country that blocks the content, you might try using a proxy server to access it.

Part 1. "Magic Bullets" ~2 hours

The first episode focuses on the search for a "cure" for cancer, which is the greatest epic in the history of science, spanning centuries and continents. It centers on the story of Sidney Farber, who, defying conventional wisdom in the late 1940s, introduces the modern era of chemotherapy, eventually galvanizing a "war on cancer."

Part 2. "The Blind Men and the Elephant" ~2 hours

This episode picks up the story in the wake of the declaration of a "war on cancer" by Richard Nixon in 1971 and the search for a cure. In the lab, rapid progress is made in understanding the essential nature of the cancer cell, leading to the revolutionary discovery of the genetic basis of cancer, but few new therapies become available.

Part 3. "Finding the Achilles Heel" ~2 hours

This last episode starts at a moment of optimism: Scientists believe they have cracked the mystery of the malignant cell, and the first targeted therapies have been developed. But very quickly cancer reveals new layers of complexity and a formidable array of defenses. Many call for a new focus on prevention and early detection as the most promising fronts in the war on cancer.

Yes Melissa, there were some challenging moments to watch. However, the 3rd part of the series called "Finding the Achilles Heel" gave me optimism. Skip ahead and watch from the 1:07:00 mark for ~3 minutes until the 1:10:20 mark.
It discusses the concept of "Combination Therapy". This is a big part of the future.
The concept of Combination Therapy is to hit cancer with multiple drugs simultaneously. It's already happening with chemo, but chemo is not exactly "precision" medicine and the toxicity can be difficult.

To paraphrase from the video, "Cancer researchers have narrowed down the number of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes that cause cancers, and they discovered that these genes work in groups called pathways."

More specifically, Dr. Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins says "there are only about 200 genes that are responsible for the vast majority of cancers. These 200 genes funnel down into about 12 pathways. If scientists can figure out a way to target these pathways, you will have a therapy that's useful for many kinds of cancers."

Since multiple pathways exist, "mono targeted" therapy has failed. Cancer is too smart. If it's blocked at one pathway, it simply moves to another pathway to proliferate. You need to shut down all of the pathways, without adding toxicity, to beat cancer.

Further, if they can harness the Immune system (immunotherapy) with "combination therapy", we should see favorable long-lasting results.