The most likely reason is far less interesting: humans are big and opaque, and it's hard to target gold nanorods to the tissue of interest at high enough penetration to actually cause full regression of the tumor (she only did in mice when injecting directly into the tumor, but if the tumor is so well-localized in humans we just remove it surgically).

It's still a cool idea, and really awesome that she got it to work as well as she has so far. It might be an important tool against specific types of cancer (she's targeting head and neck cancer now, because cancers in those areas can't be targeted surgically a lot of the time--and combining with drugs, because realistically she isn't going to get every cancer cell filled with nanorods).

But the biggest problem is that this is a tough thing to bring successfully into the clinic even in the best of circumstances. There are tons of more straightforward ideas that don't get funded in biotech, and tons of even more straightforward ideas than that do get funded and fail to pan out.

Anyway, the idea that this could "cure cancer" overall is just wrong. For instance, the magic of it is in aiming at the cancer (to get specificity of cancer-cell-targeted nanorods (imperfect) + aim at cancer with laser (also imperfect)), but after cancer metastasizes, the problem is that you can't find all the places where it is.

The idea that it could help with some cancers that we find very difficult right now is probably correct.

The idea that someone would reject a likely outcome of revolutionizing healthcare while capturing the cancer treatment market to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (to the detriment of companies selling cancer drugs for even more billions of dollars), simply because she happens to be a black woman, is completely absurd.

Their assessment of the prospects might be slightly off. It might be only really hard instead of really really hard. But if it were highly promising, people would be falling all over themselves to steal it, to develop it to enrich themselves while she gets comparatively poorly compensated, or any of the other usual capitalist stuff that happens when people see a competitive advantage.

Anyway, I hope someday we add this to our bag of tricks. Big kudos to Dr. Green for the proof of principle work (and further developments)--but really--the next steps are not as easy as it might seem from the outside.