To partially answer your questions:
The research is very expensive because a lot of treatments are investigated to find one that works, and if they do find a treatment it needs extensive safety testing. To properly test a drug to demonstrate that it works in humans and is safe costs around $100 million (there are a lot of tests that need to be done, from metabolic studies, several types of animal studies, and eventually human clinical trials).
As far as whether there is a different "cure" for each type of cancer, there is some overlap, but often different types of cancer respond better to certain types of treatment, and some treatments are cancer-specific.
There's also still a lot of research to be done just trying to understand how cancer is caused and developed, which will hopefully eventually lead to either methods of preventing it from developing in the first place, or true cures.
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