Cancer as a Chronic Disease?

One should always take tales of miracle cures for cancer with a heavy dose of salt but this does sound like cheering news:

A drug prescribed for one of the commonest forms of leukaemia has reduced the deadly cancer to a chronic illness that can be managed with a single pill a day, specialists said yesterday.

New data issued in London showed that about 90 per cent of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) who take the drug Glivec are alive and well after five years.

It’s not a cure, doesn’t make the disease go away. As with the retrovirals for AIDS, nothing quite so wonderful. Rather, it keeps it under control, turns it from an acute illness to a chronic one:  keeps that specific disease at bay for long enough for you to die of something else.

Which leads to some wildly uninformed speculation from myself. I seriously doubt that there ever will be a "cure for cancer" as cancer is not one disease. There’s hundreds, thousands possibly, of different  cancers, each with their own specific causes and progessions and it’s most unlikely that one drug or treatment will ever cover them all. But as I say, that’s wildly uninformed speculation.