Cancer is a disease where we are making progress, but not fast enough. The immune-based approaches of the last few years are real progress, but cancers like pancreatic cancer are very hard to fight.
I heard Craig Venter once say that the cure for cancer is early detection. Wish I could find the video.
Early detection is double-edged sword: It is very hard to tell in early stages if the cancer develops into harmful variants and a small false positive error can have drastic consequences, if applied on scale [1]. The result is that many undergo unnecessary therapy with 100% harmful consequences (not life threatening, but permanent damage like removed organs/sterility).
See also: "The Case Against Early Cancer Detection"
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-c...
I'd put my money (research) rather on better treatment than earlier detection.
Also, i'm not sure why we can't have both: better early detection and better treatments.
One of the vps from Google's moonshot division,Jeff Huber, just left to head up a company that is a spinout of illumina, called Grail
No affiliation, but they have a bunch of interesting software jobs open after looking at thier site
http://newton.newtonsoftware.com/career/CareerHome.action?cl...
This is one reason nobody recommends widespread screening for pancreatic cancer - apart from the inevitable false positives and so on. We currently don't have anything very wonderful to offer even to people in whom it was detected early, although it does improve the chances somewhat.