When you think of the costs of cancer care, one can imagine that drugs like checkpoint blockers or transfer of these T lymphocytes are actually cost-saving, just as treatments for hepatitis C, while expensive, overall save money by preventing hepatitis and hep - hepatocarcinoma in patients.

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.

Cancer can no longer be classified according to the organ in which it arises. It has to be characterized in terms of the genetic mutation that exists.

Hepatitis C was a devastating disease but because fundamental research was done in hepatitis C, it is now curable. It is now absolutely curable with new medications. So this is transformative.

Cancer vaccines are in the future. And they could be very effective. Checkpoint blockade, which is acting your immune system to recognize those cancer cells and kill them is another very promising approach and there have been some checkpoint blockade drugs out in the market now that will release the brake on T lymphocytes, the T lymphocyte is your major killer of tumor cells.

If one has a routine colonoscopy at the age of 50 and then colonoscopies thereafter as the physician recommends, you could largely prevent colon cancer, you could detect it in its very earliest stages and cure it.

Probably all of us have random rogue cancer cells floating around in our bodies but by and large, in the majority of cases, our immune system circulates and acts as a surveillance mechanism and kills off those few tumor cells.