JEDDAH, 12 September 2007 — Oncology nowadays is focusing on studying the targeted biological treatment in an attempt to replace chemotherapy that causes unwanted side effects in cancer patients. Cancer will no longer have to be a fatal disease. The new radio technology targets the tumors protecting the neighboring tissues at the same time.
“The problem with chemotherapy is that it does not differentiate between cancer cells and normal ones. It has side effects on normal cells too,” said Dr. Yasser Bahadir, oncologist and professor at King Abdulaziz University.
“There is a big development now with the targeted biological treatment and the chemotherapy targeted to the tumor,” he said.
He said that there were chemo medications targeted to the tumors. One of these is Avastin, that works as an anti-angiogenesis. In order for tumors to grow, they need to be surrounded with blood vessels to nourish them.
“The medication prevents these blood vessels from growing and being nourished. The medicine achieved advanced results in treatments. It was used in different kinds of cancer. But it was mostly effective in colon cancer as the disease control rate increased 70 percent and the treatment rate increased an average of 30 percent,” said Dr. Paulo Hoff, a doctor of internal medicine and an oncologist.
The cure rate differs from patient to another depending on their health status.
The medicine is being studied in the treatment of lung, breast and kidney cancer. However, the highest numbers of studies have been done on colon cancer. Colon cancer is the 5th most common cancer in the kingdom after breast, liver, blood and lymphatic nodes. “The reason why the work has been concentrated on colon cancer was with the first indication, it proved it responded to the new treatment,” said Hoff.
The treatment was tried on other types of tumors and research will be published soon on the response in cases of breast, lung some types of brain tumors.
Avastin studies started a decade ago through lab studies first. “Medications take 15 to 20 years starting with lab tests until they are used to treat patients. This was one of the first medicines in the field of targeted medicine. More angiogenesis medications are undergoing studies to treat other kinds of tumors in the near future,” said Hoff.
“We hope that one day, the conventional chemotherapy will be gone, but that is not the time yet. Right now we still use both kinds of targeted biological medicine and chemotherapy,” said Hoff.