Many Mediocre Cancer Therapies Become Much Better When More Targeted to Cancerous Tissues

One of the important areas of cancer research and development that appears to receive a great deal of attention and funding, but in practice seems slow to make it from the laboratory to the clinic, is the targeting of therapeutics to cancerous cells. Reductio ad absurdum, near any of dozens of existing chemotherapeutics would do the job of completely clearing tumors, with minimal to no side-effects, if one could only find a way to delivery tiny amounts of the therapeutic to every cancer cell while avoiding every healthy cell. The inability to target treatments this effectively is exactly why cancer remains such a problem. Killing cells is easy. Killing only the desired cells is hard. Today's research materials provide an example of this principle. Tumors compromise the immune system, and many of the more recent cancer therapies involve delivery of signals to rouse otherwise suppressed immune cells to unfettered aggression. This is a double-edged sword: an aggressive immune system is capable not only of attacking the cancer, but also of causing a great deal of harm to the patient in the worse cases. Still, this balance of benefit and harm is largely a better one for patients than is the case for chemotherapy. Why not make this delivery of immune-modulating signals much more targeted, however? As it turns out, this greatly improves the therapy. 'Drug factory' implants eliminate ovarian, colorectal cancer in mice The researchers used implantable "drug fact...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs