What exactly is chemotherapy and how does it work?
In: Biology
Used to work in chemotherapeutic research as a part of one of my internships.
Chemotherapeutics are, essentially, chemicals with notable toxicity that preferentially are uptaken by cells with cancer-like characteristics. See, cancer cells largely “look” like your normal cells to the rest of your body, and they’re rather difficult to specifically target because of this, so we attempt to exploit key differences when targeting them even if the exact method causes collateral damage elsewhere in the body–after all, cancer is life threatening (moreso the longer it goes untreated), and damage elsewhere can be managed *to a point.*
One of the common exploits is that cancer cells, like many rapidly dividing cells, take up many materials/molecules needed for growth at a much faster rate compared to their original cell type often. Thus, you can (hopefully) inject a toxic substance that has a theraputic window large enough to kill cancer cells due to their higher relative dose, while the normal healthy cells are still in a tolerable level of exposure. Alternatively, you target specific growth/division pathways, which cancer cells are much more dependent on since it’s a part of their mutation profile driving cancer-like behavior. Whether or not cancer cells have a wide enough margin in this area compared to normal cells though is not a given, and will depend on the specific cancer variant, cell type, drug candidate, and so on, hence all the investigation–there are some pretty widely useful drugs out there, but yeah, they largely just end up targeting rapidly dividing cells as a general trend, hence why chemotherapy can destroy stem-like cells, cause hair loss, and so on as collateral.
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