Cancer Moonshot: Moonshot as a Magic Code to Guide Successful Solutions of Tough Challenges Such as Cancer

Abstract

Presidential projects deal with monumentally important issues. Moonshot and war on cancer were two unrelated presidential projects: the moonshot project was successful, but the war on cancer project was unsuccessful. President Biden brought up these two presidential projects on Sept. 12, 2022 apparently with an intention to urge the health profession to learn from the success of moonshot to come up solutions to save 50% of cancer patients in the following 25 years. The goal of cancer moonshot was modest. The health profession, however, must make a drastic change on the approach of cancer therapy to fulfill cancer moonshot. Moonshot was an extremely difficult challenge. So far, the USA was the only nation able to achieve this difficult challenge. Evidently, the right approach to a difficult challenge was the magic code to the success of moonshot. On the other hand, a wrong approach to a simple matter might result in making simple problem unsolvable. Apparently, war on cancer was such a case. Cytotoxic chemotherapy and radiotherapy based on the killing of cancer cells were the choice of cancer establishments to wage the war on cancer. The approach was wrong, because cancer was a disease due to wound unhealing. Creating more wounds definitely was a wrong approach. The war on cancer was loomed to fail on the day of its declaration. The wrong approach continued to dominate cancer therapies with no hope in sight to successfully saving cancer patients. Cancer moonshot was in essence a protest of the failure to save cancer patients from the highest government official to the health profession. A change of approach on cancer therapy is obviously needed to save cancer patients. Since cancer is caused by wound unhealing. Wound healing process is the most appropriate modality of cancer therapy. Wound healing comes naturally, because the nature creates chemo-surveillance to ensure perfection of wound healing. Wound healing requires the proliferation and the terminal differentiation of progenitor stem cells (PSCs). The success of wound healing depends on the efficient differentiation of PSCs to eliminate the symptom created by the wound. Chemo-surveillance plays such an important role to dictate the success of wound healing. Chemo-surveillance can be damaged under pathological conditions to produce tumor necrosis factor (TNF) to cause cachexia symptoms. Inability of PSCs to undergo terminal differentiation due to the collapse of chemo-surveillance then forces PSCs to evolve into cancer stem cells (CSCs) and then to progress to faster growing cancer cells (CCs). Obviously, cancer arises due to the collapse of chemo-surveillance. Restoration of chemo-surveillance with CDA formulations is, therefore, the right approach of cancer therapy. The wisdom of the nature beats the wisdom of cancer establishments on the issue of cancer.