Precision medicine is one way to attack cancer and it's proven to be very effective but, remember that like HIV/AIDS, you're going to need combination therapies.

HIV/AIDS from converted from a lethal disease into a chronic disease because basic scientists' fundamental research was done that illuminated aspects of that virus and allowed the generation of therapies like antiretroviral therapies. And so now HIV/AIDS is not a lethal disease, it is a chronic disease.

The key to HIV/AIDS was to say let's give a patient multiple different therapies at the same time and that makes the virus much less likely to mutate.

Precision medicine is one way to attack cancer and it's proven to be very effective but, remember that like HIV/AIDS, you're going to need combination therapies.

Precision medicine is diving into the DNA with a knowledge that everybody's tumor has a unique genetic profile and you want to be able to identify that specific piece of DNA that has become mutated and that is driving cancer growth.

There are clearly environmental factors that can decrease the incidence and death from cancer. I would still say though that the majority of cancers cannot be prevented at this point, but they can be treated and they can be treated two major ways.

The decrease in incidents of death from cancer is largely attributable to new medicines or therapeutics. Perhaps a third is attributable to changing our environment, and that includes of course smoking which I believe accounted for probably 20 percent of deaths from, certainly from lung cancer, more than that from lung cancer, but from cancer overall.