--- title: TIME100 Health Panelists Talk ‘Curing Cancer’ description: CNN anchor and breast cancer patient Sara Sidner, Dr. Vinod Balachandran, and Novartis U.S. president Victor Bulto discussed progress and challenges in tackling the “evolving” disease at the 2025 TIME100 Health Impact Dinner. canonical: https://time.com/7284460/health-impact-dinner-panel-curing-cancer-evolving-disease-progress-challenges/ author: Chantelle Lee article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-05-14T03:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T07:52:25.013Z article:section: Health og:title: TIME100 Health Panelists Talk ‘Curing Cancer’ og:description: CNN anchor and breast cancer patient Sara Sidner, Dr. Vinod Balachandran, and Novartis U.S. president Victor Bulto discussed progress and challenges in tackling the “evolving” disease at the 2025 TIME100 Health Impact Dinner. og:url: https://time.com/7284460/health-impact-dinner-panel-curing-cancer-evolving-disease-progress-challenges/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltae5e906569f5dc01/6998c68a93610c5433c2f9fa/time100-health-event-002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: time100-health-event-002 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME100 Health Panelists Talk ‘Curing Cancer’ twitter:description: CNN anchor and breast cancer patient Sara Sidner, Dr. Vinod Balachandran, and Novartis U.S. president Victor Bulto discussed progress and challenges in tackling the “evolving” disease at the 2025 TIME100 Health Impact Dinner. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltae5e906569f5dc01/6998c68a93610c5433c2f9fa/time100-health-event-002.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # ‘We Already Are Curing Cancer’: TIME100 Health Panel Discusses How to Solve an ‘Evolving’ Disease > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=6fb7208e-c033-4f73-91d1-808e4fd39cdf&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: ‘We Already Are Curing Cancer’: TIME100 Health Panel Discusses How to Solve an ‘Evolving’ Disease [Watch (HLS stream): ‘We Already Are Curing Cancer’: TIME100 Health Panel Discusses How to Solve an ‘Evolving’ Disease](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/n5jNgycK.m3u8) (23:17)  _Published 2025-05-14. Sara Sidner, anchor and senior national correspondent for CNN, told the audience at the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner on Tuesday night that she did 16 rounds of chemotherapy after she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2023—and worked the entire time through it. The room erupted into loud applause. “It is possible to live your life while trying to kill cancer,” Sidner said. “We’ve come such a long way, and I just quickly want to say to this room: whoever is in this room that is a nurse, a doctor, a physician, a researcher, someone who is creating drugs for us—thank you. Thank you for the research. Thank you for your work; we need it so, so much.”_ by [Chantelle Lee](https://time.com/author/chantelle-lee/) ## Chantelle Lee Reporter May 14, 2025 3:00 AM UTC by [Chantelle Lee](https://time.com/author/chantelle-lee/) ## Chantelle Lee Reporter May 14, 2025 3:00 AM UTC Sara Sidner, anchor and senior national correspondent for CNN, told the audience at the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner on Tuesday night that she did 16 rounds of chemotherapy after she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2023—and worked the entire time through it. The room erupted into loud applause. “It is possible to live your life while trying to kill cancer,” Sidner said. “We’ve come such a long way, and I just quickly want to say to this room: whoever is in this room that is a nurse, a doctor, a physician, a researcher, someone who is creating drugs for us—thank you. Thank you for the research. Thank you for your work; we need it so, so much.” Sidner was joined onstage by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, surgeon-scientist and director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Victor Bulto, president of the U.S. unit for Novartis, which sponsored the event in New York City. The three appeared on a panel moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park to discuss the groundbreaking innovations in cancer detection, treatment, and prevention—and the research that still needs to be done. Sidner, who is a [2025 TIME Closers honoree](https://time.com/7210611/sara-sidner-cnn-talks-breast-cancer/), said she hadn’t always planned on publicly sharing her cancer diagnosis. But when she learned she had stage III breast cancer, she realized she wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret from everyone. “You have spent your life telling other people’s stories—maybe this is something you need to tell, and tell it in a really honest, sometimes embarrassing, way. Tell people what it’s like going through this journey,” she recalled thinking. Balachandran, who is a [2025 TIME100 Health honoree](https://time.com/collections/time100-health-2025/7279583/vinod-balachandran/), called cancer “the most urgent health crisis of our lifetime.” In the United States, one in two men and one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer during their life, according to the [American Cancer Society](https://www.cancer.org/cancer.html). Part of what’s challenging, he said, is that cancer is “an intelligent cell that is constantly programmed to evolve.” “We have historically been treating it with drugs that do not evolve with an evolving cancer,” Balachandran said. “Even though cancer is intelligent, we do not fight it with a medicine that is intelligent. We’ve always envisioned developing intelligent medicines to diagnose and treat cancer, but we have not really been able to achieve this goal.” Now, though, Balachandran said he thinks the health industry has made progress on this. New technologies, including AI, and research advancements—such as understanding how the immune system recognizes cancer—could help medical providers diagnose cancer earlier and treat cancer more effectively, Balachandran said. Balachandran has used [mRNA technology](https://time.com/5927342/mrna-covid-vaccine/) to create personalized vaccines that research has indicated could boost patients’ immune systems to help treat pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is the [third-leading cause of cancer death](https://www.med.upenn.edu/pcrc/aboutpancreaticcancer.html) in the U.S. Bulto said that it’s imperative to continue making grounds on the medicine but also on understanding the patient experience. “On the one hand, we have a lot to do on the science front, but also, the more we learn about the science, the more we are learning … that we have to become as good or as innovative in how we bring those medicines to patients as how innovative the medicines themselves are,” Bulto said. “We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the lived experience of patients, the felt experience of patients.” He said that whatever innovations are developed for cancer treatment, it’s critical to ensure they’re distributed to all patients who need them—whether they live in New York City or in a rural community. At the same time that advancements are being made in the cancer field, [research funding through the U.S. National Institutes of Health is at risk](https://time.com/7216299/nih-budget-cuts-science-research-funding/) under the Trump Administration. Despite that, Balachandran said he is “optimistic.” “We’ve made so much progress, so it’s really hard to stop this level of progress when results are really transformative and really sort of ushering in a next era of cancer care,” he said. “If they work, how could you not support it? Because cancer is something that affects all of us.” To close out the discussion, Park asked the panelists: will we cure cancer? Balachandran replied immediately: Yes. “We already are curing cancer,” he said. “The question is: how more can we cure cancer, and how more effectively can we cure cancer, and how more simplistically can we cure cancer with less side effects or less medication, and for whom, and for more people?” “The next revolution of cancer care is really about expanding access to more patients, expanding more treatments with less side effects for people,” he continued. Sidner and Bulto said they agreed with Balachandran, but Sidner added that it was critical to ensure that cancer is cured equitably. She pointed out that Black women are [nearly 40% more likely](https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/breast-cancer-facts-and-figures/2024/breast-cancer-facts-and-figures-2024.pdf) than their white counterparts to die from breast cancer. “Something’s wrong there,” she said. “And so for whom will cancer be cured is a huge question that needs to be addressed.” _The TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of Health was presented by Novartis and FIGS._ ## Transcript Good evening everyone. How's everyone doing? All right. Well, we were having a great time backstage, so I'm sure I'm really looking forward to this conversation where we'll really be talking about how we're transforming the way we diagnose and treat cancer, and it's a very exciting time in the field. But as Sam alluded to, I think it's also a very perilous time, as we see, you know, funding cuts that are threatening to really slow down the pace and the momentum that we've been building in recent years, because in the end, it's all about the patient and ensuring that patients have access to innovative and transformative therapies. So, Sara, I'd like to start with you. You've been very open about your diagnosis and your journey. Why was it so important to you to share your story? I didn't want to. Honestly, at first I was going to hide it from my friends. Hide it from my employer, hide it from some of my family members because I worried about honestly, I worried about potentially losing my job and the way that people would look at me and people looking at me like I'm going to die. Um, and feeling, you know, that that I was, you know, less than and that I had to be really careful around me. Um, so there was all these things kind of bouncing around in my head, and eventually I found out that I had stage three breast cancer and that I couldn't hide it. Uh, not to. Certainly to my employer. Employer? Of course. I was going to tell my immediate family, um, and over time is when I said, you know, you have spent your life telling other people's stories. Maybe this is something you need to tell and tell it in a really honest, sometimes embarrassing way. Tell people what it's like going through this journey. Um, and so it was important to me to be searingly and sometimes disturbingly honest about the treatments that are available now. Which, by the way, um, I did 16 rounds of chemo and I worked the entire time. Um, took. I took one I took one day off a week to, to do the infusion. Um, and it is incredible to me how much has been figured out. I went to to MSK. It's an incredible, um, healthcare organization. It's an incredible hospital with great doctors and nurses and medical staff. And what I learned there was that it is possible to live your life while trying to kill cancer. And I thought I'd be drinking soup out of a straw, I really did. I was like, oh, beaches. I was watching all these sad movies. I mean, it was, you know, I was so back in the 70s and 80s where chemotherapy for some people and I've talked to patients who had cancer in the 80s who told me that they actually thought about committing suicide. That the chemotherapy treatments were so bad. Um, and so we've come such a long way, and I just quickly want to say to this room, whoever is in this room, that is a nurse, a doctor, a physician, um, a researcher, someone who is creating drugs for us. Thank you. Thank you for the research. Thank you for your work. We need it so, so much. It's a testament that I could work. And I actually felt like Superwoman because they gave me steroids, a cocktail of things I didn't know. So at four in the morning, I'm doing my taxes on, like, January 15th. Um, I thought that was weird, but I did it anyway. So the way in which treatment for the whole body has been, um, created and curated for each patient is is frankly remarkable. And I'm really thankful for that. I think that's a very good word. Remarkable. When we talk about some of the the new ways that we can diagnose and treat cancer. Um, Vinod, we're also seeing cancer occur in younger and younger people like Sarah, you know, who still have a lot of life to live. How is that changing the way we think about when we should be screening for it? You know, traditionally, you know, Sarah, you referred to like 70s and 80s and there are a lot of kind of traditional thinking about it's you normally get it when you're older. It's a disease of older people. How is the fact that we're seeing it in younger and younger people transforming the way we are screening and thinking about treatments for people who might be on these treatments for decades? Yeah, I mean, cancer as thank you for highlighting this is really, I think, the most urgent health crisis of our lifetime. And perhaps, you know, you could even envision of all of history. It still remains the greatest unsolved health challenge ever. It's been around for millennia, but we still don't have a solution for cancer. And right now, in 2025, 1 in 3 Americans will face cancer throughout their lifetime. And despite decades of research, it remains the second leading cause of death of Americans. In 2025 and in the next 25 years, the number of Americans with cancer is expected to increase by over 50%, some of which is caused due to increasing incidence in younger individuals. But I do think, um, right now, one of the some of the advances that we have made in recent years really allow us to fight cancer with breadth and potency that we really haven't been able to do before. Cancer is is a is a is a unique It's an intelligent cell that is constantly programmed to evolve. So it has hardwired in its, um, in its DNA, um, a continuous evolution. And we have historically been treating it with drugs do not that do not evolve with an evolving cancer. So we even though cancer is intelligent, we do not fight it with something, a medicine that is intelligent. We've always envisioned developing intelligent medicines to diagnose and treat cancer, but we have not really been able to achieve this goal. But I think now we're in an era where we actually can do advances in AI technology, advances in understanding how the immune system recognizes cancer, advances in genetic ways to be able to edit the DNA of human cells. All of these really put us, I think, at a really exciting moment in history where we can really launch the next biomedical revolution. And I think these new tools that we will that will sort of come out of this will allow us to diagnose cancer earlier, treat cancer more effectively, and hopefully really translate this into cures. So, Victor, that really falls to pharmaceutical companies. You know what Vinod is saying. Like applying all of these new technologies, genomics, genomic sequencing AI to developing smarter therapies. How are these platforms transforming the R&D at Novartis, at companies like Novartis, to to think smarter and to try to get ahead of these cancer cells? Yeah. So in a way, if you think about a company like ours 70, 70 years into developing treatments for cancer. On the one hand, we've gotten much better at developing medicines that ideally have higher therapeutic indexes. So being more potent, but also being more gentle with patients so that we can bring these therapies earlier and earlier into into the treatment. But also what decades of being at the forefront of technological innovation? We were the first company to develop a cell therapy and get it approved by the FDA, for example. And we continue to push the boundaries, like now with Radioligand therapies. We're talking about them before we're learning that. On the one hand, we have a lot to do on the science front, but also the more we learn about the science, the more we're learning are actually. Sara, to your story that we have to become as good or as innovative in how we bring those medicines to patients as how innovative the medicines themselves are. We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the lived experience of patients, the felt experience of patients, and how their expectations have shifted tremendously. And we've learned that actually there's two emerging groups of patients that we have to think completely differently about as they fight cancer. One is younger patients, right? There's been a 79% increase in the global incidence of early onset cancer. Those patients have your expectations. They want to thrive through their treatment. They want to work through their treatment because they are the most productive years of their lives. And they're not going to settle for a treatment that just achieves better survival. They want to thrive through all of that. And the other segment is actually older adults. You know, we've seen that the 85 years plus are the fastest growing segment of cancer survivors. And they themselves also have tremendously different expectations that they had in the 70s or the 80s. So we also, as we start developing new modalities and new medicines, have to factor that in, particularly because patients are just not going to accept that. We tell them this is a great medicine, but this is what it's going to do. But we're developing, for example, this new platform called Radioligand Therapies. It's a very old technology if you think about it. So radiation has been used to treat cancer for 100 years right now, but it was used as an external beam radiation that just was useful for big solid tumors. We thought like, what if we turned that into a medicine that can seek cell by cell at a granular level, the cancer and just bring not a full beam radiation, but what would bring one radioisotope of lutetium that actually will selectively kill these cancer cells. And in doing so, we now have a couple of therapies approved that actually are building the promise of can we approach cancer in a much more selective and intelligent way, in a way as well, that tries to spare the healthy cells around the tumor so that patients can thrive through their treatment? And hopefully we can bring these therapies earlier and earlier. So in a way, we are looking at incorporating both the medical science component but component, but also the social component, the deep understanding of the lived experience of these patients. And by merging these two, hopefully, you know, do much better for patients moving forward. I mean, I think one of the most exciting things really on the horizon is the immune therapy, really, how the immune system can recognize cancer because it is, in essence, perhaps the most intelligent and potent cancer killing machine in the human body. It does this every day, kills millions of cancer cells even before they form tumors. So if we can understand how to how the immune system recognizes cancer and deploy it, you can use this natural ability of the human body to recognize and kill cancer to for early diagnosis or treatment, and potentially for cures. So unlike, for example, chemotherapies, where you have to constantly keep taking the medicine and if you stop taking the medicine, perhaps the cancer could come back. This opens up the possibility of single treatments for lifetime cures. So. But for that, we have to understand how does the immune system recognize cancer and really have to deploy it. And I think right now we have really exciting tools to do this. I think medicine such as RNA medicines and others. So I think I think it's really, actually really exciting time for cancer care. You mentioned the patient experience. Um, and I consider myself a doctor, but a doctor of Google, just like many patients. Uh, I have been trained well in googling, um, and one of the things that I did want to talk about is aftercare. I think, um, in my experience and the experience of I've talked to about two dozen women who have gone through with the same kind of cancer I had, which is the most common cancer. Um, it has hormone receptors, which means, ladies and gentlemen, they want to get rid of your hormones because that is what's helping the cancer grow. Or that's what I googled. But whatever. It's close. It's close to that. It's problematic. Um, and I will tell you that the thing that freaked me out the most, like I was like, I don't care. I was like, poison it out, burn it out, cut it out. Do what you have to do, but get it out of me. And then I was told, well, you're going to be on medication for 7 to 10 years. And I said, expletive you. I do not want to be living with this for 7 to 10 years. I'm a former college athlete. I wanted to be able to to do my workouts and run and jump and play and and exercise and get stronger knowing that my bone health was going to be affected and all of these things. And I just felt like, how is it possible that now that we've cured this, or now that we've at least cut out the cancer and gotten rid of it, that now I have to suffer the consequences of taking something like anastrozole or tamoxifen, which is another popular drug that a lot of women are given that you then I have trouble getting out of a chair. And by the way, I'm not that young. I'm 52 years old, just a FYI. Okay. So. But I'm getting out of a chair like an 80 year old. And so I've been talking to my doctors about why is this? And they're like, this is what's readily available right now. Um, things are being worked on. I'm like, but are they. This is we women, you know, are are beings too. And I said, you know this because it puts you into menopause immediately. So when you're 30 years old or 28, like one of my close friends and you get cancer, you're into menopause. You're afraid of not being able to have children. I mean, there's so many things about life that is crushed. And mentally, that's really, really, really hard. So I hope that companies like yours, that research like you are doing, that doctors start looking at what can be done to help the patient live a wonderful life afterwards. That mirrors. Maybe it's not the same. Okay, we accept that we get to live. We're happy about it. But I want to be able to get out of a chair and not worry about my bones breaking and being brittle. Um, you know, over the next few years, as a person who, who enjoys, you know, really living life and doing physical activity. Yes. I think that really speaks to Sarah, the sort of transforming way that we're thinking about cancer, right, as something that's not a death sentence or anything close to it, but something that people are living with for many years now and learning how to live with and with respect to that, since I have, you know, someone from the farm industry? A patient and a researcher. Um, I think since we are in 2025 right now, we have to address this issue of what is happening to, you know, our biomedical research structure right now, which a lot of the treatments that we are benefiting from and seeing that Sarah is receiving, um, really came from years of investing in this system. So I'd like to just hear from each of you about how concerned you are about the pipeline and what this could mean if we are seeing such severe restrictions in support and funding and federal support, uh, what that could mean for treatments and whether we'll see any five, ten years down the road. Maybe we can start with you. Yeah. I mean, I'm optimistic, actually, mostly because we've made so much progress. So it's really hard to stop this level of progress when, um, results are really transformative and really sort of ushering in a next era of cancer care. It's a runaway train in a good sense. It's it's really hard to stop this when you have these such novel potential treatments that have really exciting possibilities to work. But if they work, how could you not, um, support it? Because cancer is something that affects all of us. So if it works, why would you not? Why would you stop it? So I think I'm very I'm optimistic about this, I think this but this really does require cross-sector partnership. This requires of all of the entire biomedical spectrum academia, biopharma, federal government, philanthropy, everyone, patients, the whole, the whole sphere. But I think we've just made so much progress and we've we've come at a point where we can go to a, a future where you don't have to get ten years of treatment. You can envision a future where you get a cancer vaccine, for instance, limited number of doses and then stop treatment, for instance, for life. You could even envision a scenario where you have prevention of cancer even before it occurs. But all of this, of course, requires us to continue and move forward. So I yeah, I couldn't agree more with you, Vinod. I think the explosion of technology and scientific understanding that has happened over the last 3 to 5 years, and the new frontiers I will bring very, very soon. I do believe will be unstoppable in many ways. So I want to maybe complement it with another wish that I have. Right? I mean, we are in the room of full of the most influential people in healthcare. care. I think we will have to put that influence to work as well, to understand how we're going to diffuse that technology and that explosion of innovation into every patient that needs it in the different communities, because many of the innovations that are coming our way are exceptionally complex as well. I mean, if you're talking about immunotherapies, you're talking about some of the most advanced personalized treatments. They're going to require quite some lift. And a lot of us working together to make sure that not only the patients that MSK can get these therapies, but if you're in a rural community somewhere with a community oncologist, you're going to be able to benefit from that in the same way that Sara benefited from the best care in a hospital in New York City. Now, the other one thinking about influence, I think you said the key word for me, which is prevention or even early diagnosis. Today, the best treatment we have would be either to prevent or to very early diagnose some of these cancers. I mean, breast cancer is going to affect 1 in 8 women in this room through the through your lifetime, right through our lifetime. As a father of three daughters, that just profoundly distresses me. And I have to ask myself, what can we collectively do to just try to go very early? Because actually, if you identify early breast cancer, there's a 99% survival rate. And then we can discuss about how do we make this patient thrive. So we have been looking at ways in which we can start to do that. And you know, we we started going into the psychology of why wanting to women today in the United States actually misses their mammograms. That is not a scientific challenge. That is a societal and very personal challenge that we all will have to tackle. Otherwise, we'll still always be behind the eight ball. So we found an interesting paradoxical insight. You know, if you think about it, in society, a society that culturally is in a way, and, pardon my English, so obsessed about breasts and yet at the same time, and yet at the same time, what it matters the most, we are not turning our attention to that very important part of the woman's body. Right? So we launched a campaign that I wanted to just make you all aware of. We called your attention, please. Right. That you. We launched at the Super Bowl. We launched it at the Oscars. And we had tremendous success in actually activating with that paradox of like, turn your attention elsewhere. And once we've turned that attention, now, what actions can you take? And we're even working. And I would love for your support in Washington, D.C., introducing new policy of why do women have to pay exceptionally high co-pays for additional screenings they need once their mammogram shows something that is actually a little bit concerning, right? So just an invitation that yes, there's a lot we can be optimistic about regarding science. We're going to get there. But then societally, we need a lot more work to activate our patients, to activate the entire group. Sitting here so that we can truly deliver for all these future patients. Clearly, yes. Clearly a lot of innovation happening and that will be happening. So in our last seconds from each of you, will we cure cancer? Vinod. Yes. For sure. Okay. Sara I'm with Vinod. Like, whatever he says. He's a researcher. I mean, did you expect me to say no? No. But realistically, given the science and what we have, what we know today. I mean, we already are curing cancer. So the question is, how more can we cure cancer and how more effectively can we cure cancer? And how more simplistically can we cure cancer with less side effects were less medication. And for whom and for more people. So all. I think this is this is where we have to go into the into the next, the next generation. The next revolution of cancer care is really about expanding access to more patients, expanding more treatments with less side effects for people. So really, um, yes. Okay. Can I just quickly say scientifically, I do believe in what Bernard is saying. I mean, some cancers have been cured in people. Um, the question is, and I think someone said for whom? When you look at statistics, black women, when it comes to breast cancer, die 40% more than their white counterparts. So something's wrong there. And so for whom will cancer be cured is a huge question that needs to be addressed. All right. There's nothing more I can add to this, I fully agree. All right. Bernard, Sarah, Victor, thank you very much for your time. 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