Not to be rude or anything, but .... no duh? This is why looking for a "cure for cancer" is a bit nonsensical. There are many different ways for cell division to go wrong. Prostate cancer is just a cancer that affects the prostate. There's no reason to assume there would be one pathology for that.
It’s not that you’re wrong, but you miss the depth of the issue. Yes, we know that people are different and there’re many redundant pathways, and every poor bastard probably has his own mutation, etc.
But we need to actually identify the mechanisms, describe them in a lot of detail, and look for very specific biomarkers. That’s what “personalized medicine” is going to be.
It’s extremely difficult to put a study like this together. So many parts can go wrong. So it’s an achievement not just for scientists who published in a good journal, but for the whole humanity.
Yes, at the time I responded, the headline was much worse. The updated version actually provides some non-obvious information. The original merely said that prostate cancer isn't one disease.
There is still a lot we do not know about why some prostate cancers grow slowly and are effectively benign and some are viciously malignant. This split leads some health practitioners to either relax or ignore screening guidelines. Being able to better narrow things down so we can avoid overly aggressive treatment while at the same time being appropriately aggressive for those that have more malignant variants. (BTW, this is not just theoretical for me)
IANAD, but the early and ongoing successes of immunotherapy across a wide variety of cancers suggests that your characterization of this effort as "nonsensical" is cynically oversimplified, if not wrong.
