These Ovarian Cancer Therapies Have Fewer Side Effects

Read on to learn more about target therapies and how they treat cancer in a different way.

Ovarian cancer has a high mortality rate and is in need of newer and more effective therapies. Anyone who suffers from this disease, or has a loved one who is battling it, knows firsthand how heartbreaking and grueling the battle can be. Many of the drugs that are used to treat cancer have a lot of side effects, and recurrence occurs in about 70% of ovarian cancer patients after they succeed against their cancer the first time around. The numbers are anything but encouraging, and something needs to be done!

For the past decade, there haven't been many new discoveries in terms of better and safer treatments for ovarian cancer. Unlike breast cancer, ovarian cancer has less funding for research and has a matching, slower-paced progress rate in the scientific world. As a result, we are still using many of the drugs we used over 10 years ago to treat this disease.

Recent advancements in cancer therapy

Women with ovarian cancer can greatly benefit from further research and development into more effective therapeutic options to help cure them of this terrible disease. Recently, some hope has emerged in the form of targeted therapies for cancer treatment. Targeted therapies are a newer type of drug for cancer that will attack cancer cells without as much damage to the normal healthy cells as traditional chemotherapy.

How do these drugs "target" cancer cells so well? It turns out that scientists were able to identify some unique characteristics that are only present in cancer cells. They then developed chemicals and drugs to target these particular unique characteristics so that these cancer cells could be picked out in a crowd of healthy ones. What ends up happening is the cancer cell then gets destroyed, all while sparing most of the healthy tissue surrounding it.

Did you know that most of the side effects of traditional chemotherapy are due to the non-specificity of chemotherapy action? Chemotherapy attacks any rapidly dividing cell and causes them to be destroyed. While this is effective at killing cancer cells because they are rapidly proliferative, they also kill off cells in our body that are naturally supposed to constantly divide. These would include the cells that line our digestive tract, our hair follicles, and so on. That's why chemotherapy drugs are known to cause hair loss and a lot of gastrointestinal distress.

The new, targeted therapies work at a more advanced level to target the actual cellular programming that exists in cancer. Though there are many different types, they all change the way cancer grows, divides, heals itself, and interacts with surrounding cells.

These types of treatments have the potential to revolutionize how doctors and patients view ovarian cancer, as well as many different types of cancers that respond to chemotherapy and radiation. Read on to learn more about the different types of targeted therapy.