Can cancer get any worse when someone tells you the treatment you are given might be recurrent?
Radiotherapy is a type of therapy that is used to treat cancer patients by using high energy radiation to control and kill cancer cells. The high energy radiation used in radiotherapy permanently damages the DNA of cancer cells while the surrounding cells suffer temporary DNA damage in which they eventually repair themselves. The following video shows how a radiotherapy is performed on brain tumor patients. 
It isn’t surprising to know that cancer cells are able to repair themselves after a full treatment of radiotherapy on brain tumors. After all, cancer cells can live on! Studies have shown the high percentage of relapse after having brain tumor radiotherapy treatment. 8 out of the 12 patients that had radiation therapy had recurrent glioblastoma while the rest of the patients had recurrent anaplastic astrocytoma, another form of agressive brain cancer.
But thanks to combination therapy, a type of therapy involving both radiotherapy and a drug. This drug or targeting agent, known as Panobinostat makes initial and repeated radiation much more effective, and is currently being tested in a variety of other cancers. It is a histone deacetylase inhibitor that modifies gene expression of about eight percent of RNA molecules produced from genes. This allows changes in protein production, which can unsettle the growth of cancer. The highest dose was tested in patients and was well-tolerated along with improvement in survival.
Combination therapy for brain tumor sounds pretty promising. The next step is to validate it in more and future studies.
Posted on Februrary 28, 2016 by Lorraine Yu
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