The overall increase in survival rates masks somewhat the huge progress made on some kinds of cancers and very little progress on others. The more common a cancer is, the more attention and investment it gets, the more patients you have for clinical trials, the drugs are developed, studies done, etc.

But if you have an exceptionally rare cancer, then that one is not going to have the some money, patients or attention, and so survival rates don't move much.

For example, the five year survival rate for stage 3 breast cancer is between 66 and 98%! For renal small cell carcinoma (aka kidney cancer, quite rare), stage 3-4 is a death sentence. Like 12% five year survival.

What we need is a breakthrough on getting the body to kill it's particular kind of cancer. All of us have cancer at any given moment, but it never grows because our bodies see it and kill it. Cancer grows when the body doesn't recognize what's there as something to kill, and that necessarily is a person to person issue. My body (as far as I know) has no problem killing kidney cancer. But someone else's body might not.

I didn't mean to write this much so to sum up, we don't just need better screening. We need personalized medicine that can get each of our bodies to kill the particular cancer our bodies are crap at killing. And in that sense, a personalized cancer vaccine is super, super exciting. Maybe we could get to a point where there is just one figure for 5 year survival and it is 99%. I hope we do.