>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.

Its partly the way the problem is framed. Perhaps we wrongly assumed that cancer is one disease with a distinct root cause / cure purely based on similarities in symptoms. If so, talking of "curing cancer" is like "curing inflammation" - its much too general a symptom to cure, even though doctors are able to treat many cases of it by narrowing down the cause of inflammation, or treat it partially etc. Maybe cancer will be cured piecewise over the years rather than all at once, and people will laugh at how humanity thought there was a disease called cancer.