Redwhite17 comments on Experimental Blood Test Detects Cancer up to Four Years before Symptoms Appear
Redwhite17 1 point2 points3 points 1 year ago
My understanding is that there are cancerous cells in everyone's body. Typically, the body's immune response is enough to destroy the cancerous cells before they form tumors and begin spreading throughout the body. So the question shouldn't be "can we treat these non-tumors cancer cells with chemotherapy", and rather "what can we do to increase our body's immune response to the prevent tumor forming cancer cells?" And I am afraid that this is not taught enough in medical schools.
Preventing cells from mutating into cancer is behind all the 'anti-oxidant' diets, smoking cessation, sunscreen, etc advice you see all the time. Eat right, exercise, protect yourself from known irritants. That's been taught for ages.
Rituxan was the first I really heard of, but other monoclonal antibodies have been used to help the immune system target the cancerous cell lines. The problem remains that cancers are basically the bastard offspring of normal cells and retain a lot of the features of those normal cells, so even the newer targeted antibody therapies will still have collateral damage.
My med school experience was ~20 years ago, which is eons in science/medicine. I guarantee med students now are learning better medicine than I did, and today's research will improve tomorrow's medical education.