Experts Discuss Progress and Challenges in Cancer Research at TIME100 Health Forum

Leading experts in cancer research reflected on the significant strides made in tackling the disease, along with the work that remains to be done toward finding a cure, at the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York on Thursday.

Resources have been the key toward making important discoveries, said Shane Jacobson, the CEO of both the American Cancer Society, which sponsored the event, and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Philanthropic investments and federal government funding, he continued, have allowed scientists and oncologists to make the progress we see today in cancer prevention and treatment.

Cancer is “omnipresent” Jacobson said. In the U.S., one in three men and women will receive a cancer diagnosis sometime during their lives, according to the American Cancer Society.

“It has been, historically, such a devastating disease,” he said. “We knew so little about it that it has garnered resources—and it takes resources to tackle most of the problems we face in healthcare.”

Developments in tackling cancer—such as the encouraging results of an mRNA cancer vaccine that were announced by Moderna and Merck last month—stem from “decades of progress, decades of new knowledge, decades of even failure, and learning from that failure to bring forth these kinds of results,” Jacobson said.

“It used to be maybe on an annual basis we would celebrate something significant, but the innovation is moving so rapidly that these celebrations, these big moments, are now almost on a monthly basis, and we should expect that speed to continue,” he said. But, he added, just as important as these advances is ensuring that everyone is able to access the drugs and therapies they need—”otherwise,” he said, “the innovation falls short of its potential.”

Vaccines and immunotherapy have emerged as powerful tools to fight cancer, said Dr. Andrea Cercek, a gastrointestinal medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was a 2025 TIME100 Health honoree.

“The hope … between vaccines and immunotherapy as well is that they harness the immune system, which is really the most powerful drug we have,” she said. “It can fight anything as long as it’s equipped to do so and it recognizes something is foreign, and so it’s really that combination that needs to happen for therapy to work.”

Cercek herself has been pioneering immunotherapy drugs to treat cancer. In 2024, she and her colleagues released the findings of their study of patients who had a specific type of rectal cancer, revealing that, after six months of being treated with an immunotherapy drug, none of the patients showed detectable tumors, meaning that none of them needed chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery afterwards.

Cercek has expanded her research, and said during the panel that “we’re very close” to seeing this kind of treatment being used successfully for other types of cancer so that patients don’t have to undergo more invasive therapies.

TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park, who moderated the panel, closed the discussion with a big question: Will we cure cancer? And if so, what will that cure look like?

“Absolutely we will,” Cercek replied. “Probably it will be with early detection and prevention—I think that is going to be, ultimately, what cures cancer.