In 2016, “cancer” is still a word that cannot be avoided in anyone’s life. The China Cancer Report is freshly released and shows that the number of cancer patients in China is huge, with 4.3 million new cases and 2.8 million deaths in 2015 alone. Considering that Chinese society is rapidly aging, the number of cancer patients is bound to continue to increase in the coming decades, even without taking into account factors such as smoking and environmental pollution. Our war with cancer remains long and hard. But what is the goal of the war? In my opinion, it is not to eradicate cancer or to cure it, but to turn it into a chronic disease. It is not realistic to eradicate cancer. The vast majority of cancers are “age-related diseases”, the product of genetic mutations in the body’s natural aging process. Just as we cannot stop wrinkles and presbyopia, we cannot develop vaccines to stop mutations like we can with infectious diseases. Our real goal is to turn cancer into a chronic disease that can be controlled with drugs that have few side effects. In the past, people were afraid of talking about cancer not because it was fatal, but because they thought it was quick and painful to treat. In China, hypertension kills 2 million people every year, which is close to cancer, but very few people collapse after knowing their hypertension. Although there is no scientific evidence, there is no doubt that psychological stress significantly reduces the quality of survival of patients. If cancer can be turned into a chronic disease with a treatment method that has few side effects, it is extremely important to prolong patients’ lives, reduce their psychological burden, and improve their quality of life during their survival period. This is my definition of “success in beating cancer”. We already have an example of success. Fifteen years ago, the five-year survival rate for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia carrying the BCL-ABL mutation was less than 30 percent. But after more than two decades of scientific research, Gleevec, a targeted drug for this mutation, was introduced in 2001, bringing the five-year survival rate from 30 percent to 90 percent, and the initial group of patients who tried Gleevec have survived for more than two decades. Gleevec has turned chronic myeloid leukemia into a chronic disease like hypertension and diabetes. Although patients need to take the drug for life, it is not scary. Many people with chronic myeloid leukemia, once they know the treatment, usually breathe a long sigh of relief, “okay, okay.” That’s the goal. At the beginning of 2016, the U.S. government has launched the “Moonshot Initiative” to devote significant resources to the fight against cancer, with the main focus on immunotherapy as well. I believe that all cancer patients will hear the term “immunotherapy”. Currently, effective immunotherapy can be divided into two categories: drug therapy and cell therapy. Immunotherapy is the third generation of anti-cancer therapy compared to the first generation of chemotherapy and the second generation of targeted drugs such as Gleevec. Targeted drugs have had examples of turning a few cancers into chronic diseases, but the advent of immunotherapy has given us hope for the first time of turning most cancers into chronic diseases. Excitingly, two recently launched PD-1 inhibitors, Opdivo and Keytruda. immune drugs have shown very exciting, and even shocking, results in patients with melanoma, lung cancer, kidney cancer, head and neck cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer, and more. For example, when used in patients with advanced metastatic melanoma, they have reduced or even eliminated tumors in over 60% of patients for over 3 years! It is important to know that usually these patients with advanced metastases only survive in weeks. Previously, if the drug could be extended by a few months, it was a victory. Some of the first patients with advanced melanoma to try immunotherapy have lived for nearly 15 years and no more cancer cells can be detected. Has immunotherapy cured the cancer? It’s hard to say, because just because cancer cells can’t be detected doesn’t mean they aren’t there. However, doctors have more and more methods in their “anti-cancer toolbox”, and cancer treatment will enter the era of “precision medicine”, with more and more emphasis on “individualization” and “low side effects”. More and more patients will be treated with “precision medicine”, which emphasizes “individualization” and “low side effects”. More and more patients will receive “cocktail therapy”: surgery or radiotherapy can deal with local lesions, chemotherapy and targeted drugs can kill cancer cells in all parts of the body, and immune drugs can activate the autoimmune system, which can be used to consolidate treatment and prevent recurrence, in addition to directly hunting down and killing cancer cells. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, someone will say, “Remember when everyone thought cancer was terminal in 2016? That was hilarious.”