Pardon my naïveté. Has a honey-pot strategy been tried for Cancer? Like maybe we can't kill it but we can lure it to develop in a very localized place, like a cyst growing on the back of your hand or something, and then we remove the cyst.
When cancer metastasizes, that means newly divided cells from the tumor have penetrated the blood stream or lymph system, and are circulating around the body. They will accumulate and grow anywhere that they happen upon if the conditions for growth are favorable.
The primary tumor isn't packing up and migrating, it is rooted in place like a tree. A cancer cell circulating through your body doesn't seek to get to the lung, it just might happen to end up there and it might grow well there and form a new tumor, like an acorn falling off a tree. Some acorns will fall into rich soil, some will fall on pavement or get eaten. You can't coax acorns to fall squarely into your bucket, and even if you did you still have the tree to deal with.
Ok, following with the totally naive speculation. What if it were not a place, but a specific environmental factor or a specific trait? Cancers mutate quickly, and resources are limited, so cells that are more successful might starve those which lag behind, as it happens in animal populations. And once the cancer has "fallen into the trap" of specializing for something, that something could be targeted, or the favouring environmental conditions removed.
This is the clonal evolution model of cancer, and is how many solid tumors are comprised and treated. The danger is that the selective advantage for the cancer cell is often by masking itself as a healthy cell to the immune system, which complicates treatments but this interaction can still be targeted (see PD-1).
Yes, the idle speculation about a "honeypot" method was of artificially encouraging the cancer to evolve in a certain direction, even boosting its growth, until it has reliably mutated in a way that makes it susceptible to some other intervention, like being starved or targeted by some particular marker.
There's not actually one disease called "cancer". Cancer is just the catch-all term for a large set of disorders where cells grow at an uncontrolled rate. Such a disorder can develop in different ways, for different reasons, in different cells, at different times, etc.
Honeypots only work when there is consistent attack pattern to detect, and a means to mitigate that attack. But with cancer, getting a tumor to grow in one kind of cell will not prevent a different kind of cancer from developing in a different kind of cell.
