How personalized cancer treatment can help?

Have you ever wondered how personalized cancer treatment can help?

In this article, we will discuss how personalized cancer treatment works and how it improves the quality of life of a cancer patient by finding the best-suited treatment in the first shot and by saving them money and time.

Cancer, as we know is a disease that involves abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. There are so many theories about cancer from the history about the occurrence to its toxicity and how it would spread.

As the studies are done and the advancement of the science occurred understanding about cancer became more clear and so the development of cancer treatments were outlined. The treatment of cancer includes surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy are known largely.

Surgeries are to remove the tumours in initial stages, and radiation therapy is to damage the DNA of cancerous tissue by ionizing radiation to kill them. Whereas chemotherapy is the treatment with one or more cytotoxic drugs as a standardized regimen. Traditional chemotherapeutic agents act by killing rapidly dividing cells, critical cancer cells property. It was then noticed that the combination of drugs is more effective than a single drug.

Also, it has observed that same type of cancer shows different responses to the chemo drugs used in different individuals. Hence, the studies were done to identify the best treatment for the individual patient with the help of protein and other markers present in the cancer cells. This is known as personalized treatment.

Then there is a hurdle in treating the patients in the form of resistance developed by cancer cells known as chemoresistance. Treating physicians face this challenge of resistance also known as chemoresistance, and as the cancer cells develop the resistance to the treatment drugs one by one, it becomes a headache to stop the tumour growth and further metastasization occurs.

To identify the drugs best suited for the patient in personalized treatment and find the best of them that is actively killing the cancer cells in a tumour, the researchers are working from decades. As an outcome of the studies done by scientists, we now can use cancer cells from blood or fresh biopsies of cancer to isolate and grow these cancer cells into 3D structure mimicking the tumour like environment. This helps to identify the sensitivity of cancer cells to the drugs that can be used to treat the patient. And we can find the best active chemo drug that can be used in chemotherapy or in personalized treatment.

This is said as Chemosensitivity test using 3D cell culture technique that helps physicians to select the best responsive drug or drug combination against cancer cells to the patient. This helps the patient to get the best personalized treatment with minimal exposure to unnecessary chemo drugs which would not be of any help against cancer that they are fighting and avoids side effects. That leads to improved quality of patients life and also gives better over-all survival period to patient.