[heblaj01]

While the discovered genetic make up of breast & colon cancers is important in many ways as a first step toward more accurate diagnostics & targeted treatments it appears to make the genetic search for a cure very difficult if not impossible in the forseable future because of the large number of genes involved & their changing groups for various cancers.

If on one hand one is to try inhibit the activity of all involved genes the probability is high that normal processes will be affected meaning a high rate of unbearable side effects.
If on the other hand only a selected group of genes (the most agressive) are selected for inhibition, then the treatment is not likely to avoid in the long term the other genes from causing recurrence. And the successfull treatment
will be selective (as in the case of Herceptin) not applicable to all cancers.
This also means a lot of distinct research tasks.

This is why I think other research approaches dealing with simpler (everything is relative!) more common features to the majority of cancers are more promissing in the medium term.
Among these approaches I hope that control of angiogenesis (which is common to nearly all cancers) will eventually provide safe long term stabilization if not cure to a lot of cancers. Even with antiangiogenesis there are potential side effects since new blood vessels are necessary in pregnancy & wound healing. But some of the endogenous antiangiogenesis molecules when administered externally did not appear to affect wound healing.