• Question: When you have cancer you go to chemo can they not make it stonger to stop cancer for good?

    Asked by Curtis to Mark, Linda, Koi, Franco, Claire on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Curtis I am not an expert in cancer. My understanding is that drugs used for chemotherapy act on cells that are dividing rapidly, but they will also affect healthy cells. So it is always a delicate balance between targetting the cancerous cells without doing too much harm to the healthy cells. Increasing the strength of the drug will also increase the toxic effects on the other cells.
      So this treatment is better left to oncologists who know what they are doing, I am a aParasitologist so cannot comment other than what I have done above.

    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Curtis I am not an expert in cancer. My understanding is that drugs used for chemotherapy act on cells that are dividing rapidly, but they will also affect healthy cells. So it is always a delicate balance between targetting the cancerous cells without doing too much harm to the healthy cells. Increasing the strength of the drug will also increase the toxic effects on the other cells.
      So this treatment is better left to oncologists who know what they are doing, I am a Parasitologist so cannot comment other than what I have done above.

    • Photo: Claire Bourke

      Claire Bourke answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Curtis,
      chemotherapy is a widely used treatment for cancer and in many cases is an effective way to stop tumours from growing and kill the cancerous cells. As Franco says, chemotherapy can also be very harmful to healthy cells, and part of the reason for this is that tumours result from the body’s own cells that begin to grow abnormally and live for longer than they should, which means that the drugs that kill tumour cells are also toxic for the body’s other cells, which look the same in many ways. To prevent too much damage due to chemo, therapy has to be targeted carefully (the ‘delicate balance’ that Franco is talking about).

      One explanation for why chemo doesn’t always stop cancer for good is that some tumours do not stay in the same place and can move from one part of the body to another to create new tumours in different places – this is called metastasis or a metastatic cancer. So maybe chemo removed the original tumour, but there are other tumours that have not been removed and continue to grow.

      Another reason why cancer may come back even after treatment is that tumours can occur when healthy cells undergo genetic mutations that mean that their growth and survival become abnormal; unfortunately this could happen in any cell at any time.

      As we learn more about cell biology and how healthy cells grow, divide and survive we also learn more about how this process can go wrong to cause tumours. This information will help cancer biologists to find new ways to treat cancer and, hopefully one day there will be a treatment that will stop cancer for good.

    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      HI

      Further to the answers below, there is a lot of ongoing research to improve cancer therapies. Last week I was the MC of a meeting of PhD students from our department and one of the students talked about a type of cancer drug that is better at targeting cancer cells.

      Cancer develops from different origins in different people – sometimes an infection can give cancer, sometimes it is due to a genetic mutation. Whether chemotherapy works to stop the cancer completely will depend partly on where the cancer has come from.

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Hi Curtis,

      In my understanding, chemo also affect healthy non-cancer cells as well. So it is the balance between the dose that kill the cancer cells but does not do too much harm to the non-cancer cells. There are some current research on developing treatment to be specific to only cancer and I’m looking forward to that.

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