Journey to less toxic cancer control tools

Killing tumors, but is toxic and attacking healthy cells, causing major side effects such as weakness , pain, diarrhea, nausea and hair and weight loss.

The other leading treatment against cancer is radiation. However, in recent years, a series of clinical trials have shown that it is possible to better treat and even cure some of the most challenging forms of cancer without resorting to the most toxic techniques.

For example, in the case of bad cancer Cancer, a major study published in early June at the conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, has shown that for tens of thousands of women, the surgery and hormone therapy were enough to fight cancer

found that chemotherapy was administered unnecessarily.

One of the promising treatments is immunotherapy. It forms the body's natural defenses – immune cells, also called T cells – to detect and kill cancer cells, which otherwise may adapt and hide. Some experts are cautious, having been repeatedly disappointed by d & # 39; 39, other innovative approaches to the fight against cancer.

But many consider immunotherapy as a turning point. According to Otis Brawley, medical director of the American Cancer Society, more than 30 immunotherapy drugs are under development and 800 clinical trials are underway.

Genetic badysis is also becoming more common for tumors, allowing more accurate and faster treatments. the patients. Johns Hopkins University in the United States has a genomics lab designed to help physicians customize patient treatments, rather than basing treatment simply on the location of the tumor.

"We have better tools to say:" William Nelson, director of the Johns Hopkins Cancer Center

Immunotherapy and other personalized treatments are advancing in the treatment of leukemia, cancer bad, lung, cervix, colon and rectum. However, some cancers, such as brain cancer, remain on the sidelines of these new treatments.

Oncologist Julie Brahmer hopes that someday, metastatic cancers – those that can spread to distant points of the original site – will be treated as a "chronic disease" rather than as a "chronic disease". A death sentence.

Already, doctors are intrigued by unusually long remissions – more than normal from a year and a half to two years – seen in a small number of patients; these successes represent approximately 10 to 15% of patients.