Chemotherapy Drug Resistance
ChemotherapyIn the older days, cancer had no treatment. After sometime came the surgery. But even after a surgery was performed there was a possibility of caner cells to return again. To minimize this and to make the surgery easy, in the year of 1940, a method called chemotherapy started to emerge. The ultimate aim is to kill the cancer cells present in the body by passing anti cancer drugs into the body.
While offering the chemotherapy treatment using different types of drugs depending upon the stage of the cancer, sometimes the cancer cells may resist the treatment offered. This is termed as chemo drug resistance. Even the chemotherapy may fail sometime too.
On the time of performing the chemotherapy treatment, some infected cells may not respond to the treatment. In sense they are not killed. Once they start to multiply, the resistance offered will be more. An infected cell may produce several copies of a gene. This gene amplification factor makes the chemotherapy drugs inactive and inefficient.
With a help of a molecule called p-glycoprotein, the infected cells can pump out the drugs injected into the body and thus making it inactive. The cancer cells also learn how to break the DNA pairs produced by the drugs to kill the defected cells.
It is the reason why the drugs are given in combination to kill the infected cells. If the physician uses a single drug, the cancer cells may learn how to inactivate the drug inserted into the body. So choosing the right drug combination would be the first aspect for any physician while treating a cancer patient.
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