Exploring the Evolution of Cancer Treatment: Chemotherapy and Targeted Therapies

Cancer is a lot of disease and not one because they all have different traits, looks, and activities. Humans are doing a lot to understand cancer and find treatments for it and it looks like we are all going to deal with cancer one way or the other either directly or indirectly. You might not even have someone close to you who have cancer but might just hear it in the news only to have a certain emotional attachment to the individual and that is one way you would be dealing with it indirectly.

One treatment we run to when the word cancer is mentioned is chemotherapy. In fact, we do a lot of blood checking, including PCV in the hospital just to ensure that the patient is okay only to start pumping them with this poison that would interfere with their own cells with the aim that the poison would kill the cancer before killing them. Sincerely while chemotherapy works, I always find myself reluctant when I hear a patient is going to go through Chemo because I know its Gauntlet of side effects but then why do we use chemo?

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Let me state that drugs are great and do their job, but remember that the poison is in its dose. According to studies, more than half of people who have cancerous tumors got treated with chemotherapy. Chemo drugs come in different shapes and different sizes from Adriamycin, DTIC, Cytoxan (Cyclophosphamide) and many more, and the truth is patients can either get 1 of these drugs or a combination of them all depending on their circumstances and what result is needed from the drug.

In some drugs, their function is to slow down the growth of the tumor, some are to make the cancer go away completely, while others are to make other types of treatments like surgery effective, but that which touches me is when a chemo drug is given to a patient to help them manage their symptoms when there isn't a cure for them.

A lot of cancers can be treated with chemotherapy, remember I said that it is not one disease, it is many disease in one name, so cancers like Hodgkins lymphoma, testicular cancer, and acute lymphocytic leukemia can be treated (some doctors would use a combination of Doxorubicin and other chemo drugs to become (ABVD) to treat patients) Doxorubicin is good at killing cells that divide and multiply very fast, and th drug blocks topoisomerase.

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As good as the job of doxorubicn might sound, you should remember that cells in your body also divide to create more cells such as your hair cells, and so on, and funny enough the cancer cells look just like your healthy cells in composition since most times, they are malignant cells with unending reproducing property. With this, there are a lot of collateral damages such as the cells of hair, lining of stomach wall, and cells that create immune cells.

Then, instead of shooting this drugs into the stomach, then to all parts of the body, is there not a way that we can have specialized drugs? With this type of drugs, the cancer cells are the target and the non-cancerous cells are left behind. Using small molecule drugs allow for the drugs to affect molecular processes that only the cancer cells have and with this, the normal human cells are spared. Science has done well, and they have been able to create a drugs to this effect and one of them is Imatinib which is used to treat certain Leukemia which have the BCR-ABL mutation in the cancerous cell and this is a growth signal but this is not in normal cells. Imatinib does the function of ensuring that the signal is prevented. There are a lot of BCR-ABL inhibitor drugs that are still in trial and some are doing well.

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This mode of treatment as promising as it is can have its challenges because all cancers are different from one another even when they might possibly have the same name so when we create a drug to target a particular cancer, that drug isn't going to treat another type of cancer.

Monoclonal antibodies therapy is also a targeted therapy where we use antibodies from our body, engineer them to target cancer cells and destroy them. Such drugs include Pembrolizumab, Trastuzamab, Rituximab, and so on, and these drugs can either block cancer cells from growing, deliver harmful substances to the cells to kill them, or pick them and allow the body immune system to fight them off.

Let me state that unless there is a miraculous breakthrough in the medical world, chemotherapy is going nowhere in the next 20 years and even some targeted therapies would deliver the drugs to the tumor after targeting them, but then science keeps developing more solution to help treat cancer. While chemotherapy will have to be a fight for balance within killing the cancer and not killing the patient, we still have to do with it at least, for now.

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Reference

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