It's not clear we need universal markers though. We need that for targeting with things like drugs. Cancer in general though kills by physically impinging on or resource starving other body systems. There's a certain amount of "we know it when we see it" to that (and we're pretty good at seeing it).

If you could direct a swarm of micro-robots towards the sites of metastasized cancer growths (which kill you because we can't go in and cut them all out without killing the patient from the surgery) then the prognosis would change substantially.

The holy grail would in essence be, having a system which can get to all the places cancer can, at the same sorts of size scales cancer operates - rather then needing to be in the limited range of things we can surgically intervene on.