Cancer Treatment: A to Z
- Seung Hyun
- Jan 25, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 30, 2022
All over the world, about one-third of mortality is caused by four chronic diseases: Cardiovascular disease, Diabetes, Chronic lung diseases, and Cancer; specifically, cancer is the second leading cause of death, which represents 10 million people annually died of this disease. Therefore, numerous hospitals and medical institutions have endeavored to conquer cancer by developing novel treatments. Thanks to this continuous development, human beings can cure almost all types of cancer, and many casualties from the war to fight off cancer apparently decrease. At this point, I will describe these astonishing treatments that saved our society!
IMG Credit: MedRec Hospital
What is “Cancer”?
Before talking about cancer treatments, we should know about cancer itself. A “cancer” is a disease that can start in any part of our body when cells grow uncontrollably and abnormally due to abnormal cell division. This unusual change in the cell will generate a “tumor”, which can be divided into a malignant and benign tomor. If it is a benign tumor, there is no negative impact on our body. However, it will be problematic if this is malignant: this type of tumor adversely affects the body like the malfunction of certain organs which can spread into various parts of the body, called a “metastasis”. Then, this process leads to devastating symptoms in numerous tissues. So, what is the cause of those serious problems? The answer is mutations in genetic materials that provide instruction to our body to perform a certain function. Errors in them make our normal cells work properly, leading to uncontrollable cell division with rapid speed. Based on this fundamental information regarding cancer, numerous scientists and doctors have produced several treatments.
Cancer Treatments
Currently, humans have three main types of cancer treatments: surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. With a variety of useful technology in the field of medical science, humans can apply various methods like immune technology, but these are general and comprehensive treatments.
1. Surgery
To begin with, surgery is an operational mechanism in which a surgeon directly removes a tumor due to cancer from the body. It has been the most common and basic since the first time to try to cure cancer. As it is used for the treatment of this disorder, there are many purposes for the surgery depending on each patient. It can be curative, removing a tumor from the body when it is located in a single tissue, preventive, removing a potential tumor that can be developed as a malignant tumor soon, or debulking, removing a part of the tumor if a tumor is spread into multiple locations or tissues. In addition to those purposes, there are several other purposes like staging cancer, palliative, supportive care, etc. Moreover, humans can use several distinct types of equipment, such as cryosurgery using excessively low temperatures. Thanks to its diverse applications, there are some benefits of this treatment: mass effects at one time and pathological data. However, particular drawbacks also coexist. The surgery can damage nearby organs and cannot remove diminutive or metastatic cancer.
IMG Credit: rgcirc.org
2. Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is a treatment using some drugs or medicines to kill cancer cells and provided into humans through various ways, including direct injections and oral medicine. By this therapy, humans can make various approaches related to cancer treatment, such as delaying the growth of cancer cell when a patient cannot get a surgery with a direct surgery due to inadequate health conditions. At this point, some side effects due to high toxicity of this medicine exist, but it can be reduced as much as possible by repeating dosage of a medicine in a given period. With this simple information, chemotherapy has a certain mechanism in our body. After medication of some drugs, cytotoxic chemotherapeutic agent will get around our body. Then, when the cells dived itself by “mitosis”, this agent can cease this division by interrupting DNA replication. Through this process, cancer cells can successfully stop their division; however, our normal cells also stop their function. Therefore, some risks after this dosage exist like losing hair.
To solve this problem, scientists recently developed a new technology, called “Immunotherapy”. In the previous method, humans apply external materials like some chemicals in medicine. By contrast, this therapy activates our own immune system that can detect and destroy cancer; as a result, it reduces adverse troubles in our body. For example, our immune system can prevent attacks against our body by sending T-cells. By this mechanism, enhancing T-cells themselves (T-cell transfer therapy) or releasing T-cells to cancer cells (Immune checkpoint inhibitor) can remove our notorious cancer cells.
IMG Credit: cancertodaymag.org
Surprisingly, immunotherapy is highly associated with a genetic scissor, called “CRISPR-Cas9”, which is a technology to modify our genetic materials. Several biologists attempted to combine this genetic development with our immune system to kill cancer cells. Hence, according to Khalil Khalaf, our T-cells in our immune system genetically engineered by CRISPR-CAS9 applied to T-cell transfer therapy can reduce its toxicity against our normal body cells, the precision for curing diminutive cancer cells, and its strength performed better improvement on debulking several patients’ tumors. Additionally, the stability of this modified genome in our body was better than in the previous work.
IMG Credit: Springer Nature
3. Radiation Therapy
Radiation therapy literally means a therapy using high doses of radiation to kill cancer cells. At high doses, due to its energy, genetic materials in cancer cells would be damaged, leading to stop cell division or repair themselves. Since they can repair their damaged portions in their genetic materials, they will activate “apoptosis”. Based on a general mechanism, it has two pathway how the radiation beam enters our body. The first method is known as “external radiation beam therapy”. The radiation comes from a machine can generate high doses of radiation from the outside of our body and goes through various parts of our body in which cancer cells exist. It can be used in specific locations where cancer cells are placed but depending on each patient’s health condition, it can be used in much broader areas of our body.
The second method is called “internal radiation therapy”. Several sources, which can be liquid or solid of radiation, will be put into our bodies. If this source is solid, it will only treat only part of our body. However, if it is a liquid, it will be injected through blood vessels and travel around our body. During this movement of liquid, the source of the radiation will kill cancer cells existing in distinct parts of our body. This treatment looks simple, but several side effects like enormous damage to the surrounding tissues and fatigue after this therapy exist.
IMG Credit: National Cancer Institute
Conclusion
In Korea, cancer has been the first leading cause of death, still. Even though humans saw tremendous improvement in medicine and science, they have encountered countless problems due to cancer. However, several discoveries including CRISPR-Cas9 and diagnosis of cancer by computer science have a substantial influence on conquering cancer. It is true that humans should improve our technology more and more, but since numerous changes in cancer treatments were caught, the author hopes that humans can regulate all of the cancer.
Reference
Comments