Remarkable progress, but cancer won't be cured in the near future: Siddhartha Mukherjee at HTLS

Cancer will not be cured in the near future, oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee said on Saturday, even as he pointed to remarkable progress against some forms of the disease. Most diseases do not depend on single genes, Siddhartha Mukherjee said at HTLS 2026, and changing several genes, especially in a human embryo, is not easy.In a conversation with HT’s Editor-in-Chief R Sukumar during the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Mukherjee spoke about how far humans understand life, how the rush to AI risks starving basic science in the US and India, where the line on gene editing should be drawn, and why science depends on agreeing on what words mean.

On whether advances in immunotherapy, genetic sequencing and AI meant cancer could now be cured for sure, Mukherjee said: "We can say for sure we can't cure it. That I'm pretty sure about, at least in the near future." His explanation was the breadth of the challenge.

"I think every cancer is different," he said. "We have made remarkable progress against, for instance, breast cancer, leukemias, lymphomas." A child with leukaemia whom he had treated with T-cell therapy in Bengaluru, and whose story he told in his talk, "is likely cured", he said.

Several cancers of the intestinal tract and the stomach "are really quite endemic" in India, he said, "and I'm not sure that we can clearly foresee a cure for those in the near future". He called a recent drug against KRAS, a protein involved in pancreatic cancer, "a huge breakthrough".

"But the idea that we will ever cure every cancer in sort of one fell swoop, I think, is just a mistaken idea." He was asked whether the focus on AI in medicine had come at the cost of fields such as cellular engineering and synthetic biology.

Mukherjee said there were two answers —an intellectual one and a commercial one—and the commercial answer was "unfortunately, more relevant". Intellectually, the fields reinforce each other, he said: AI is helping cell therapy, immunotherapy and synthetic biology, and the collaboration between Immuneel, the Bengaluru cell-therapy company, and Manas AI, the drug-discovery company he co-founded, involves finding new binders between cells.

Commercially, "when the pendulum swings and AI becomes fashionable", scientists who work on cell therapy are "led away" because "their grants can't get funded", he said. Scientific regulators need to "counterbalance the commercial forces" so that fields such as synthetic biology, fundamental chemistry, physics and biology "still remain funded".

"And one of the great crises in this current administration is that the commercial has overrun the intellectual," he said of the US. "It's actually true for India too," he added. "When it becomes fashionable to talk about AI and becomes no longer fashionable to talk about fundamental chemistry or fundamental biology, we lose that balance and that has very long consequences." Mukherjee went back to Vannevar Bush, who shaped American science policy after the Second World War, and the idea that curiosity-driven basic science is the "bedrock" on which disciplines such as medicine are built.

"If you disrupt the bedrock, obviously the consequences will be felt for everything," he said. Under "this current administration in the United States at least", he said, the commercial "has been allowed to overtake the bedrock".

The consequences, he said, "are not felt in the five of years, but are felt in the tens of years". Asked where the line lies now that science can edit genes, Mukherjee pointed to a distinction he draws in his book, The Gene, between "human emancipation", by which he means the elimination of disease, and going beyond it.

Most diseases do not depend on single genes, he said, and changing several genes, especially in a human embryo, is not easy. Some diseases are exceptions. "An important disease in India, for instance, sickle cell anemia, is actually very amenable to CRISPR-mediated technologies," he said.

"There is a real possibility that you can enhance abilities," he said, such as parts of human anatomy, noting that a single gene controls much of human musculature. But there are "strong reasons to believe that CRISPR should not be used for that", he said, because it would divide people into "those who are able to access these technologies, and those who are unable to access these technologies".

Mukherjee, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Emperor of All Maladies, co-founded Manas AI in 2025 with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.