Treatment
Generally the approach is to bring a cancer into remission first (absence of symptoms) and then try to eradicate the remaining cells (MRD). Often the treatments needed to eradicate MRD differ from those used initially. This is an area of much research.
It seems a sensible idea to aim to reduce or eradicate MRD. What is needed is evidence on which is the best method, and how well it works. This is emerging. Treatments which specifically target MRD can include:
- intensive conventional treatment with more drugs, or a different combination of drugs
- stem cell transplant, e.g. marrow transplant. This allows more intensive chemotherapy to be given, and in addition the transplanted bone marrow may help eradicate the minimal residual disease
- immunotherapy
- monitoring the patient carefully for early signs of relapse. This is an area of active research in several countries.
- treatment with monoclonal antibodies which target cancer cells
- cancer vaccines
Read more about this topic: Minimal Residual Disease
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“If the study of all these sciences, which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“Judge Ginsburg’s selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, “Honey—the White House is on the phone.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)