News travels slowly in the world of cancer therapy. Twelve years have passed since researchers demonstrated that chemotherapy promotes cancer growth and spread by invading healthy cells that surround the cancerous area. Five years later, other researchers showed that the drugs repair a mechanism that allows cancer cells to come back stronger.
Oncologists have seen the same effects of chemotherapy every day in the clinic, but they still administer it, even to apparently healthy patients. Women with breast cancer who have been given the all-clear after surgery— which is now the preferred first-line therapy for cancer that hasn’t spread (metastasized)—are often given a course of chemotherapy.
Breast cancers
