Chemotherapy

Combination chemotherapy, a new way to fight cancer

There are a variety of treatments available for cancer. Chemotherapy is among the most important therapies. It started in the 1940s with the application of a chemical warfare agent called nitrogen mustard. In the following decades, chemotherapy metamorphosed and its use became more widespread. The developments in the field of cancer treatment later paved the way for the advent of Combination chemotherapy. This process is a sophisticated one but it still retains the drawbacks as well as the rules of the initial therapies.

After the Second World War, the medical community took cancer development to unprecedented heights and countries like the USA played a significant role. The process called Combination chemotherapy is a result of these initiatives.

In the year 1965, a new breakthrough was achieved in the realms of cancer treatments. The pioneers of the new theory, Emil Freireich, James Holland and Emil Frei, came up with a new proposal. They suggested that antibiotic therapy should precede the application of chemotherapy. They also said that a combination of different medicines may be applied prior to administering chemotherapy. This eventually led to the use of the term Combination chemotherapy.

The pioneers of Combination chemotherapy also argued that the cancer afflicted cells can build up resistance to a particular medicine and reduce its effectiveness. On the contrary, if the doctors use a combination of drugs, it will combat the tumor in a better way. To illustrate their point, the trio started administering 4 various drugs jointly called the POMP regimen to children afflicted with ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukaemia). It resulted in significant reduction of the symptoms in the patients for a long time. The original POMP regimen was made further refined by the Medical Research Council in the UK, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and German Berlin-Frankfurt-Münster clinical trials group. Thereafter this disorder came to be considered as a curable ailment.

The early success of Combination chemotherapy along with the invention of several new drugs led many to believe that all forms of cancer can be tamed by using proper combination of drugs in the right proportion. This resulted in the pharmaceutical industry going for a drug development overdrive. One major breakthrough achieved in this period was the finding of a way to apply previously fatal doses of chemotherapy. The autologous bone marrow transplantation was invented at this time. However, the effectiveness of this method is largely restricted to Hodgkin’s disease.

In the early 1960s researchers like George Canellos and Vincent T. DeVita showed that the MOPP regime, a combination of chemical elements, could cure cases of non-Hodgkin’s and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As a matter of fact, all of the recent and proven chemotherapy regimens are essentially variants of Combination chemotherapy. The present medical belief is that some lethal chemicals, applied in combination, can heal some variants of cancer. Some of the previously incurable species of cancer like testicular cancer; Childhood ALL and Hodgkin’s disease have become quite curable after the advent of combination chemotherapy.