from my recent Human Genetics course, I learned quite a lot about what cancer actually is. It helped a great deal to understand why there's no "cure" and treatments are usually brute force and imprecise.
Cancer is basically a generic term for the loss of a cell's division control cycle - the cell starts to divide uncontrollably, forms tumors, metastasizes, causes neovascularization to feed itself, etc. This loss of control can happen for so many different reasons related to the quantities and ratios of proteins synthesized that each cancer is like a separate class of disease that needs its own treatment.
It's the same reason that there's no single fix for "car is broken". Except our understanding of this car is orders of magnitude more limited than one that we designed ourselves.
Cancer is basically a generic term for the loss of a cell's division control cycle - the cell starts to divide uncontrollably, forms tumors, metastasizes, causes neovascularization to feed itself, etc. This loss of control can happen for so many different reasons related to the quantities and ratios of proteins synthesized that each cancer is like a separate class of disease that needs its own treatment.
It's the same reason that there's no single fix for "car is broken". Except our understanding of this car is orders of magnitude more limited than one that we designed ourselves.