By Yung S. Lie, PhD, President and CEO of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation
As recent headlines have declared, we have much to celebrate on World Cancer Day: the cancer death rate in the United States has fallen 27% from its peak in 1991. Many factors have contributed to this including the decrease in smoking and improved screening efforts. Tremendous advances in research and technology have been critical to this progress. Our ability to understand the genetic basis of cancer has rapidly accelerated over the last ten years, and now scientists are decoding cancer on an unprecedented scale. This has resulted in more effective precision medicine approaches, treating patients with the therapies to which their cancers are most likely to respond.