It is estimated that between 5% and 10% of breast and ovarian cancers are familial in origin, which is to say that these tumours are attributable to inherited mutations from the parents in genes such as BRCA1 or BRCA2. In ...
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Young women who have cancer treatment often lose their fertility because chemotherapy and radiation can damage or kill their immature ovarian eggs, called oocytes. Now, Northwestern Medicine scientists have found the molecular ...
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A drug approved in Europe to treat osteoporosis has now been shown to stop the growth of breast cancer cells, even in cancers that have become resistant to current targeted therapies, according to a Duke Cancer Institute ...
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(Medical Xpress)—Lung cancer kills about 1.5 million men and women around the world – more than the number of people who die from breast, colon, pancreatic and prostate cancers combined.
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Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have determined that chronic myeloid leukemia patients who are treated with a class of oral chemotherapy drugs known as a tyrosine kinase inhibitors have significant side effects and quality-of-life ...
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Subgroup analyses from a phase III clinical trial comparing a newer chemotherapy agent called eribulin mesylate, with capecitabine, a standard chemotherapy medication in women with previously treated metastatic breast cancer, ...
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Researchers at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) have determined that cytoreductive surgery combined with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (CS/HIPEC), a complex procedure to treat advanced abdominal cancers, can ...
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For patients with advanced breast cancer, positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging can improve quality of life and survival by providing physicians with information on the effectiveness of chemotherapy ...
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A new patient protocol for aggressive and recurrent lymphoma that combines intensive chemotherapy and radioimmunotherapy (RIT) may become the most powerful cancer-killing therapy available, with the hope that patients' lymphoma ...
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(Medical Xpress)—Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center led by Dr. Karim Chamie have found that more intense surveillance and treatment of bladder cancer in the first two years after diagnosis could reduce ...
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Eighty-three percent of cancer doctors report that they've faced oncology drug shortages, and of those, nearly all say that their patients' treatment has been impacted, according to a study from researchers at the Abramson ...
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A promising new therapy for the most common form of lung cancer appears to produce largely manageable side effects, and an ongoing clinical trial is determining whether the compound treats tumors more effectively than what's ...
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(Medical Xpress)—Doctors at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that testing cervical tumors before treatment for vulnerability to chemotherapy predicts whether patients will ...
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Research at Lund University in Sweden gives hope that one of the most serious types of brain tumour, glioblastoma multiforme, could be fought by the patients' own immune system. The tumours are difficult to remove with surgery ...
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A new international study finds that prolonged, intense initial treatment in children with multi-system Langerhans cell histiocytosis (MS-LCH) can achieve survival rates as high as 84 percent—a full 15 percent improvement ...
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Chemotherapy, in its most general sense, refers to treatment of disease by chemicals that kill cells, both good and bad, but specifically those of micro-organisms or cancerous tumours. In popular usage, it refers to antineoplastic drugs used to treat cancer or the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. In its non-oncological use, the term may also refer to antibiotics (antibacterial chemotherapy). In that sense, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent was Paul Ehrlich's arsphenamine, an arsenic compound discovered in 1909 and used to treat syphilis. This was later followed by sulfonamides discovered by Domagk and penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming.
Most commonly, chemotherapy acts by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of cancer cells. This means that it also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles; this results in the most common side effects of chemotherapy—myelosuppression (decreased production of blood cells), mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract) and alopecia (hair loss).
Other uses of cytostatic chemotherapy agents (including the ones mentioned below) are the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and the suppression of transplant rejections (see immunosuppression and DMARDs). Newer anticancer drugs act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this is termed targeted therapy.
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