The Problems with Chemotherapy
Monday, December 1st, 2008By Dr. David Berman
What would the cure for cancer look like? My hope is that it would look a lot like the cure for strep throat — a pill that a patient would take for a few days to wipe out the offending invaders while leaving the rest of the body unharmed. To get to this Utopian place, cancer treatment will need to adopt several strategies from the battle against infectious disease, including:
- Exploit biological differences between the invader (cancer cell) and the host (the patient).
- Develop laboratory tests to determine which drugs are useful for a given individual’s disease (personalized therapy).
- Simultaneously attack multiple molecular targets so that if one attack fails, the others can still win the war.
It might come as a surprise that all of these strategies are standard medical practice in treating bacterial and viral infections, but none is in widespread use for cancer.
In my next post, I’ll discuss a recent paper that proposes a new approach to strategy #2. It’s a complex piece of work, but it if it succeeds in practice it would be a major breakthrough. At the very least, it organizes these critical issues in a new and important way.
