Cancer Therapies
Some conventional anti–cancer therapies include Immunotherapy, Hormone Therapy and Chemotherapy along with surgery.
Surgery:
Certain types of cancer are treated most effectively by simply removing the tumor surgically. Surgery is the oldest form of treating cancer and can also have an important role in diagnosing and staging of cancer. Surgery is done for many reasons, often to accomplish one or more of these goals: preventative (prophylactic), diagnostic, staging, curative , cytoreductive, palliative, supportive and reconstructive surgery.
Immunotherapy:
Cancer immunotherapy is the use of the immune system to reject cancer. The main premise is stimulating the patient’s immune system to attack the malignant tumor cells that are responsible for the disease. This can be either through immunization of the patient, in which case the patient’s own immune system is trained to recognize tumor cells as targets to be destroyed, or through the administration of therapeutic antibodies as drugs, in which case the patient’s immune system is recruited to destroy tumor cells by the therapeutic antibodies.
Since the immune system responds to the environmental factors it encounters on the basis of discrimination between self and non-self, many kinds of tumor cells that arise as a result of the onset of cancer are more or less tolerated by the patient’s own immune system since the tumor cells are essentially the patient’s own cells that are growing, dividing and spreading without proper regulatory control.In spite of this fact, however, many kinds of tumor cells display unusual antigens that are either inappropriate for the cell type and/or its environment, or are only normally present during the organisms’ development (e.g. fetal antigens). Examples of such antigens include the glycosphingolipid GD2, a disialoganglioside that is normally only expressed at a significant level on the outer surface membranes of neuronal cells, where its exposure to the immune system is limited by the blood-brain barrier. GD2 is expressed on the surfaces of a wide range of tumor cells including neuroblastoma, medulloblastomas, astrocytomas, melanomas, small-cell lung cancer, osteosarcomas and other soft tissue sarcomas. GD2 is thus a convenient tumor-specific target for immunotherapies. Other kinds of tumor cells display cell surface receptors that are rare or absent on the surfaces of healthy cells, and which are responsible for activating cellular signal transduction pathways that cause the unregulated growth and division of the tumor cell. e.g. ErbB2, a constitutively active cell surface receptor that is produced at abnormally high levels on the surface of breast cancer tumor cells.
Hormone therapy
This can be used to target specific hormones in males for prostrate cancer and breast cancer in women. Hormone therapy, also known as androgen deprivation therapy, is the use of drugs or surgery to decrease the production of male hormones, or androgens, in order to stop or limit the growth of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is hormone-sensitive or hormone-dependent, meaning that prostate cancer growth depends on androgens, particularly testosterone. The goal of hormone therapy is to dramatically reduce testosterone levels in the blood, thus slowing the rate of prostate cancer cell growth. Hormone therapy is the primary treatment for prostate cancer that has spread beyond the prostate gland to distant sites, including lymph nodes, bone and other organs.
With breast cancer, the female hormones estrogen and progesterone can promote the growth of some breast cancer cells. So in these patients, hormone therapy is given to block the body’s naturally occurring estrogen and fight the cancer’s growth. There are two types of hormone therapy for breast cancer: drugs that inhibit estrogen and progesterone from promoting breast cancer cell growth and those used to turn off the production of hormones from the ovaries. Hormone therapy for cancer treatment stops hormones from getting to cancer cells.
Systemic Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer with drugs that can destroy cancer cells by impeding their growth and reproduction. These drugs often are called “anticancer” drugs. Chemotherapy drugs are given intravenously, by injection or by mouth. Chemotherapy is often used alone, or in conjunction with radiation therapy or surgery. Most of the patients can be treated with immune or hormone therapy, however, the remaining 10–15% of (breast) cancers comprise a “receptor-negative’ or “triplenegative”category defined by the absence of expression of the receptor proteins. The triple negative breast cancer is highly proliferative and aggressive with poor prognosis due to a lack of specific treatment guidelines, and therefore, triple-negative breast cancers are managed with standard chemotherapy .Unfortunately, such treatment is associated with high rates of local and systemic recurrence. The combination docetaxel/capecitabine has shown survival advantages when compared to single agent docetaxel suggesting that the combination regimen may show a superior benefit.