For the millions of people battling cancer, the treatments options can sometimes be worse than the disease. Radiation and chemotherapy are the two main treatments used today and both come with vast side effects. While chemotherapy does attack cancer cells, and has helped some patients kick cancer out of their body, it doesn’t work for everyone. Now a new test could tell a patient how successful chemotherapy will be.
How it works
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute believe cancer cells that are on the verge of self-destruction are more likely to succumb to chemotherapy than cancer cells that have yet to reach that stage. While funding for these kinds of studies is difficult, scientists believe they developed a way to test cancer cells and see how far along in the destruction process they are.
“Many chemotherapy agents work by damaging structures within cancer cells,” says the study’s senior author, Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber. “When the damage becomes so extensive it can’t be repaired, the cells initiate a process known as apoptosis, in which they sacrifice themselves to avoid passing the damage on to their descendants.”
How it could change treatments
If researchers knew where in the destruction phase cancer cells were they could design more targeted drugs for cancer, or vary the time of chemotherapy to be most effective. More tests need to be done, but Letai believes the results are promising.
A change in medical thinking
The findings suggest that the conventional reasoning behind the success rate of chemotherapy, the study authors say.
“The traditional explanation, that chemotherapy targets fast-growing cells such as cancer cells, has some merit, but it has never been entirely satisfactory from a scientific viewpoint,” Letai said. “For one, there are several types of fast-growing cancers that are not responsive to chemotherapy agents, and several types of slow-growing cancers that are.”
This new development offers a more complex understanding into cancer and the treatment options offered.
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