Lovely cancer research

In Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2007, 6, 115 there is a paper to motivate everybody who is working on oncology. 'Why is cancer drug discovery so difficult?'

'Oncology has one of the poorest records for investigational drugs in clinical development, with success rates that are more than three times lower than for cardiovascular disease. The widespread, relentless and lethal nature of cancer persists, with only incremental overall improvements in treatment outcomes, despite billions of dollars of public and private investment. The few notable successes, such as imatinib (Gleevec; Novartis) in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), are, so far, exceptions.'

Somewhere else they state :'cancer models are notoriously problematic'

Should I be glad that I am not working in this field? Hmm, I do not care, I am used to failure. That is my job I think.

They have another wise remark: 'A good target is useless without a correspondingly good cognate drug.'

I would like to rephrase this to : 'I do not want your well validated target for which there is only a lousy biological assay.'