Is there a cure for cancer sitting at the back of the medicine cabinet already?
A solid tumour is the perfect example of a complex adaptive system at work. It is an ecosystem with competitive and cooperative networks of cells at play. This is one of the reasons why cancer is so difficult to treat.
Historically, the approach has been to blast tumours with the most toxic drugs at our disposal – cytotoxic chemotherapies. These are aimed at causing massive cell death in populations of rapidly dividing cells. Of course, there’s a good degree of collateral damage too, as anyone who’s had chemotherapy can attest – those toxic drugs don’t distinguish between rapidly dividing tumour cells and rapidly dividing cells in the immune system, hair follicles, stomach lining and so on.
We’ve pretty much done the same thing with radiotherapy, blasting the tumour with radiation in the hope that it kills the cancer cells, but again we have non-cancer cells in the neighbourhood that also get fried along the way.
