Do you know your cancer therapies?
Similar to brand names being referenced in a generic manner, chemotherapy is sometimes used incorrectly to refer to all types of cancer treatments. In actuality, chemotherapy specifically describes a drug treatment that damages cancer cells more than it damages normal cells.
Other types of anticancer therapies include targeted therapy and immunotherapy, which have revolutionized cancer treatment.
Targeted therapy
Targeted therapies are medications that seek out specific cancer cells to destroy or inhibit growth. Since these medications are highly selective, they often have fewer effects on normal cells. Side effects from these targeted therapies are usually less common and less severe than those associated with chemotherapy.
Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy has been available for decades, but recent advances have helped experts understand how to control the immune response to increase effectiveness.
The term immunotherapy today usually refers to a specific form of treatment called checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy. This reduces the inhibitory controls over the immune response, which frees the immune system to potentially target cancer cells that it previously had been prevented from attacking.
Which cancer treatment do you need?
The type of cancer therapy used is based on your specific diagnosis and what would be most effective based on results from clinical trials.
Sometimes it’s possible for your care team to combine or sequence these treatments to improve your body’s response since they all work in different ways. When combining different therapies, clinical trials look at how the treatments might interfere with each other, as well as how they might help each other. However, combinations of chemotherapy, targeted therapy and immunotherapy have been successfully used to treat several cancers.
Dr. Jon Richards is a hematology/oncology physician at Advocate Health Care.
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