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Articles: Science | About Cancer Treatment !!!
- Mr. Pamulaparti Venkata Phaneendra
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In 2002, a Cancer Research UK study, IBIS I, showed that tamoxifen could also be used to prevent breast cancer in high-risk post-menopausal women. However, tamoxifen is not without side effects, so Cancer Research UK is now looking at another anti-oestrogen drug, arimidex, in a study called IBIS II. Arimidex seems to be as effective as tamoxifen, but causes fewer side effects.
Other hormone-based therapies in use today include cortisone, used to treat some leukaemias and lymphomas, and 'androgen-ablation therapy' (which uses drugs to lower the amount of the male sex homone testosterone) to treat prostate cancer.
5)Immunotherapy
In the 1850s, doctors in Germany noticed that patients' tumours would occasionally shrink if their tumour became infected. This observation led to the idea that the body's immune system could be harnessed and made to fight cancer.
Around the same time, doctors throughout Europe, encouraged by the success of Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine, attempted to make a 'cancer vaccine' by injecting patients with crude extracts of tumours from other cancer patients. These treatments were largely ineffective, but the field of 'immunotherapy' was born.
Initial progress on immunotherapy was slow, and over a hundred years' work in the laboratory yielded little success in actual cancer treatment. This all changed when in 1975, Georges Köhler and César Milstein, working in Cambridge, discovered how to make synthetic antibodies.
Their discovery, coupled with an ever-increasing understanding of the immune system, has led to a variety of treatments and strategies that use the immune system to tackle cancer. Some, such as the antibody-based breast cancer drug Herceptin, are now used routinely to treat cancer patients.
Immunotherapy can be local or systemic.
Local immunotherapy delivers the treatment to the affected area. For example, the BCG vaccine can be injected into the bladder to treat bladder cancer, as it causes inflammation that can cause the tumour to shrink.
Systemic therapy treats the whole body and is useful for targeting cancer that may have spread. In the 1980s, scientists at the Cancer Research UK Medical Oncology Unit at the Christie Hospital in Manchester showed that the protein interferon alpha could cause tumours to shrink in patients with low-grade lymphoma. Interferon is now used to treat several different types of cancer.
Immunotherapy can also be non-specific or targeted.
Non-specific immunotherapy works by boosting the body's immune system in general, so that its natural cancer-killing activity is enhanced. Both of the examples of local and systemic therapies (above) are also examples of non-specific immunotherapy.
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