Before looking at the future of cancer research and treatment, let us take a quick glance at the past. A mere 20 years ago the cancer cell was a black box. We could look at it, describe it, measure it, weigh it, but we could only guess at what was going on inside. We approached the treatment of cancer, and still do, by finding it as early as possible, before it had a chance to spread, outlining its extent (staging), and either removing it or treating it with an x-ray beam. If neither was possible, it was called an advanced cancer and it was, in those days, considered incurable.
By the 1950s it became apparent that those patients who failed this kind of treatment had recurrences because the tumors had metastasized. Some of their tumor cells had sneaked away from the primary lump and developed secondary growths elsewhere. This accounted for the recurrence of cancer even when surgeons thought they had removed it all. Cells that escaped and circulated in the blood needed something that was also put into the blood to chase and destroy them; this was developed first in the form of chemotherapy , chemicals that can get anywhere and kill circulating tumor cells, and now in the form of biologic therapy, chemical substances that either mimic a natural material found in the body or a purified form of a natural substance in the blood.
What most people do not realize is that when patients die of cancer, they do not die from the effects of the cancer where it started. They die of metastases, because these secondary growths eventually crowd out normal organs, usually the liver, a lung or the brain.
