The vast majority of human genes have been tied to cancer, complicating research

This sounds like a potentially serious conundrum! Hope, this will be resolved soon! Or is it mostly hype?

However, just a mentioning of cancer in a research paper related to human genes does not mean the research subject was cancer! Thus, a big grain of salt is suspected here and the relevance of this research result is somewhat questionable!

"... The University of Liverpool researcher started to wonder just how many human genes are associated with cancer, and set about doing an analysis of genetic papers on the online medical archive PubMed. Of the 17,371 human genes studied at one point or another in papers in the archive, the vast majority have some connection to cancer. ..."

From the paper:

"Cancer is one of the most common diseases of modern times. In industrialized countries, cancer affects roughly one in two people at some point during their lives [1.] and cancer incidence and mortality is expected to continue increasing given the ageing populations worldwide ...
As of 2020, over 200 000 papers are published each year mentioning cancer [Caution: Mentions does not mean it was subject of the research paper] ...
Of the 17 371 human genes with at least one paper in PubMed, 15 233 (87.7%) also have at least one paper mentioning cancer (see [6.] for methods). Only three (SLC26A5, PRPH2, and CRYZ) out of 4186 genes with over 100 publications do not have a publication mentioning cancer. ..."

The vast majority of genes have been tied to cancer, complicating research

Cancer as the most studied biomedical topic