A lot of people don't understand that cancer isn't a foreign thing invading your body. It's literally your own cells that have gone out of control. It's not a bacteria or virus, but your own cells that are causing the problem. Killing cancer is incredibly easy. Most poisons that are toxic to humans will kill cancer. It's not superhuman. The problem is you also kill the person with cancer. Finding something that just kills the bad cells, those out of control is the challenge, and it's far from easy.
Chemo and radiation attack cancer by targeting faster-growing cells. Anti-angiogenesis drugs try to cut off the blood supply to cancerous tumors to starve them. Very often the only difference between a cancerous cell and a "normal" cell is something that's deep inside the cell. A variation in the DNA that causes the cell to reproduce without checks. Finding a way to target cancerous cells is not easy since they often look like "normal" cells. They just grow really fast and in the wrong places.
Imagine yourself looking over boxes on a conveyor belt moving past you. Every box looks the same to you, but inside a few boxes is something bad instead of something good. Your job is to find those bad boxes and remove them before they get out. But, how do you know which ones are bad? How do you manage to identify them and then remove them? Do you destroy every box to ensure nothing bad gets through?
To truly fight cancer you have to find a way to kill yourself that kills the cancerous cells before they kill you. Since both the cancerous cells and normal cells are nearly identical, it's more than a small challenge. You can't just tear open every cell in your body and examine the DNA to find the bad ones. Doing so would kill you.
An old hematologist of mine said that everyone has cancerous cells popping up, likely on a daily basis, but the vast majority of the time the body identifies them and removes them before they can cause any trouble. As we get older our immune systems wear down and from time to time one of those cancerous cells that might have been destroyed easily forty years ago takes root and starts to grow. Why didn't the body recognize it before it could take root? Was the immune system busy fighting off a virus or bacteria? Was the immune system just worn down? Did this particular cell just avoid detection for whatever reason and now that it's out of control it's growing too fast to contain?
Killing cancer isn't nearly as easy as a lot of people like to think it should be. A whole lot of people have devoted their lives to trying to find an answer only to discover that there's no easy answer. I've always been intrigued by the idea of using another person's (or animal's) immune system to attack cancer. If you transplant someone's cancerous tumor into another being, that being's immune system would recognize it as being foreign and attack it. Could you then harvest their antibodies to that tumor and use them to fight the tumor in the original patient? Or would those antibodies also latch onto the noncancerous cells in the patient's body and destroy them?
In a perfect world, you could develop cancer-specific antibodies that would only target cancer cells. Some progress has been made in that regard. It may be possible at some point to immunize people against certain cancers. We're just not there yet and it's not because the "cancer industry" is protecting itself. It's because this is a very, very challenging puzzle to solve. You have two things (normal cell and cancerous cell) that look alike from the outside, but one will kill you and one is needed to survive. Determining which is which, is a challenge that modern medicine is desperately trying to unravel. It's a massive challenge.
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