30/07/2018
How to therapy the cancer?
Surgical therapy: Surgical therapy is the earliest applied method of treating cancer, and it is also the first choice for many early cancer treatments. Many early cancers can be cured through successful surgery. Some cancer patients develop advanced disease and cannot undergo radical surgery. However, in order to alleviate the patient's pain and prolong the patient's life, surgery can also be performed. This type of surgery is called palliative surgery. For example, colon cancer obstructs the intestine and cannot defecate normally. A palliative operation of the large intestine is needed to relieve the obstruction of the tumor to the intestinal lumen. It is not possible to perform surgery on any cancer, such as blood cancer (ie leukemia).
Chemotherapy: Chemotherapy is the use of chemical drugs to treat cancer, generally refers to Western medicine anticancer drugs. These drugs can inhibit or kill cancer cells at different stages of cancer cell growth and reproduction for therapeutic purposes. However, existing chemical drugs also damage normal human cells while killing cancer cells. Therefore, different degrees of side effects such as nausea, vomiting, and hair loss often occur during chemotherapy. Currently, chemotherapy is mainly used for various types of leukemia and for patients who are inoperable but not sensitive to radiation therapy. In addition, it is also used as an adjuvant therapy after cancer surgery to kill cancer cells that are scattered or can only be found under the microscope, delaying or preventing cancer recurrence.
Ordinary radiation therapy: ordinary radiation therapy is to kill cancer cells with radiation to achieve therapeutic purposes. Some cancers have a good effect on radiotherapy, or are sensitive to radiotherapy, such as Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, etc.; while others are not sensitive to radiotherapy, ie, poorly effective, such as pancreatic cancer, colon gland Tumor, chondrosarcoma and melanoma. Radiation therapy can effectively kill cancer cells and avoid tissue defects and deformities caused by surgery. When cancer has spread to other tissues or moved elsewhere, the surgery cannot be completely removed, and radiotherapy can be used to kill cancer cells. Like chemotherapy, ordinary radiotherapy also causes damage to normal cells of the human body, so it has a series of side effects.
Immune cell therapy: Immune cell therapy is the latest technology developed in recent years. The principle is to directly put a large number of undifferentiated dendritic cells into the blood vessels in the tumor or around the tumor, which can quickly and massively enhance the ability of dendritic cells to recognize specific cancer cells. The dendritic cells can help the helper T cells to rapidly induce a large number of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) to attack specific cancer cells in a short time. Recently, doctors can use tumor mutation burden to predict sensitivity to checkpoint inhibitor therapy in various solid tumor types reported to date. Early evidence suggests TMB is independent of PD-L1 expression, but TMB is correlated with higher response rate to checkpoint inhibitor. A minority of TMB-high tumors are also MSI-high. Tumor mutation load is associated with production of neoantigens which may be recognized by the immune system.
Target therapy: Targeted treatments have seen significant effects in the treatment of certain types of cancer since the late 1990s and are as effective in treating cancer as chemotherapy, but with fewer side effects than chemotherapy. Molecular target therapy is an immunotherapy that blocks cancer cells' specific growth factors or receptors. This therapy is like a "guided missile" that can accurately hit targets and inhibit specificity. The growth, metastasis and invasion of tumor cells avoid unnecessary side effects caused by the complete destruction of traditional anticancer drugs. For example: Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which affects the growth of lung cancer cells, affects the formation of neovascularization (VEGFR) on which lung cancer depends. If the message transmission process of these lung cancer growth is blocked, the growth of lung cancer can be effectively inhibited, and the damage to normal human tissues can be minimized. There are many modes of blocking, such as: specific binding of small molecule compounds (EGFR-TKI) to receptors, or binding of antibodies to specific receptors on the membrane of lung cancer cells, blocking these key points to inhibit cancer cell growth.
