Zeitschrift für Integrative Onkologie

The Old and the New In Medical Cancer Therapy

Abstract

Daniel Gandia

Medical cancer treatment has evolved in a geometric manner since Gilman´s Mechlorethamine introduction into the bedside. Chemotherapy was born and rapidly proved its worth in different tumors and different clinical settings. Initially, the bright results were seen in hematologic malignancies, namely complete remissions in some types of leukemias and lymphomas and posteriorly in solid tumors, it changed the natural disease history in osteosarcoma, becoming adjuvant methotrexate the new overall survival drug in this malignancy. Many pediatric and young adults’ tumors comported complete remissions with chemotherapy, rendering them as curable diseases. As this, testicular cancer became the first example of a curable cancer model within advanced solid tumors (Cisplatin was the gladiator here). Even when the first clinical trial became from the sixties, during the seventies Oncologists became interested in the after-surgery chemo in breast cancer. Two pivotal trials (the US and Europe), continue showing that even nearly 40 years after, the overall survival benefit of adjuvant chemo in this disease is impressive. As many as with chemo, hormonotherapy proved and continues to prove its worth in postmenopausal breast cancer women. Adding to the before, two milestones in chemo history are the role of chemo in larynx organ preservation and its positive role in the colorectal cancer adjuvant setting. Taking as a profit chemo radio sensitizer power, the role of concomitant chemotherapy and radiotherapy came up to age: Head neck, rectal cancer, anal cancer only to mention some tumor topographies amenable to this combined approach with organ preservation objectives.