The described strategies in this article are still a matter of working where the light is shining, not where it would be most effective. This is an age of genomics, genomics is popular and widely appreciated, and it is thus easy to raise funding for genomic work. Therefore people are trying to build personalized and per-cancer methods based on specific genes. The ability to raise funding for work is far more of a determinant of direction taken than expectation of quality of results, sadly.

So this is just an incremental update of the old strategy of trying to find a better chemotherapeutic for each cancer. It isn't going to work fast enough and well enough. There are not enough researchers and isn't enough funding to tackle every one of the hundreds of cancers and their subtypes in any reasonable about of time via the one project per cancer approach.

The only viable approach to a sweeping cure for cancer is to identify commonalities shared by very large fractions of all cancers. The chimeric antigen receptor strategies are a step in this direction, producing a technology base that has a much lower cost of adaptation to each new cancer in the class that they can target, rather than needing a whole new project from scratch. But is only a modest step.

The best way forward appears to me to be blockade of telomere extension: sabotaging telomerase [1] and alternative lengthening of telomeres [2], a small collection of mechanisms. If developed, it can be applied to all cancers, as all cancers depend absolutely on telomere lengthening. They can't evolve their way around it, as is the case for many existing methods of targeting particular mechanisms in a type of cancer. It is too fundamental a part of cellular biology. Blockade of telomere lengthening would be absolutely and determinedly the full stop at the end of all cancers - and would cost no more to develop than any one or two existing therapies that can treat only one subtype of cancer.

[1]: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-01/usmc-rtt1231...

[2]: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-control-alt-delete-ca...