Cells are tiny and there are billions upon billions of then in our body. If cancer starts to form, how is it that in some cases, treatment can kill every single cell and cure a person of cancer? Isn’t leaving even one cancerous cell dangerous as it’ll multiply infinitely?
In: Biology
You are right that all it takes is a single cancer cell for the cancer to relapse.
So when we give radiotherapy we definitely want to kill every single cell, otherwise the treatment will have been in vain.
To tackle this, we do two things
1) Deliver high enough doses to statistically kill every cell in the irradiated area with high certainty.
2) Deliver dose to a small volume surrounding the tumor to have some margin and account for cells which possibly have detached from the gross tumor.
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