Bone Cancer - Understanding The New Approaches For Treatment!

The human body has 206 bones and bone cancer can affect any of these bones. This condition starts when healthy bone marrow cells mutate and grow out of control to form a tumor. There are many different types of bone cancer. Treatment of bone cancer varies from case to case and depends on factors such as, type of cancer, stage at which it is diagnosed and the patient’s overall health amongst other factors.

Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation are the three most common types of treatments favored for bone cancer. Surgery is usually used for low-grade tumors. This involves the removal of tumor and the surrounding healthy cells and tissues to ensure that that cancer does not recur. For high-grade tumors, surgery may be accompanied by chemotherapy, radiation or a combination of the two.

Chemotherapy involves the delivery of medication to destroy cancer cells orally or intravenously. Radiation involves the use of high energy X rays to kill cancer cells. This is often used to treat patients with a tumor that cannot be surgically removed.

Apart from these standard forms of treatment, bone cancer patients are often advised to take part in clinical trials for their treatment. This can be described as a research study to test the efficiency of new approaches to the treatment of bone cancer. A clinical trial can be used to treat the safety and efficacy of a new drug, the new dosage of standard drugs or a new combination of treatment types. As a member of a clinical trial, you may be one of the first few people to benefit from treatment even before it is available to the general public.

Some of the new options available through clinical trials are:

1. Immunotherapy: This is also known as biologic therapy. It is designed to boost the patient’s immune system to fight cancer cells. Mifamurtidesi one of the types of immunotherapy being tested. Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as monoclonal antibodies are also being tested for their ability to block specific molecules.
2. Targeted therapy: This type of therapy targets the genes and proteins that contribute towards the growth and survival of cancer cells. Targeted therapy limits the damage caused to healthy cells and tissues and only blocks the growth of cancer cells.
3. Myeloablative therapy: This involves an intense regimen of chemotherapy. High doses of chemotherapy aim at destroying all the cancer cells. Unfortunately, in the process, healthy cells may also be killed. This may be followed by introducing stem cells through a bone marrow transplant to the patient’s body to renew blood cells.
4. Intraoperative radiation therapy: These trials evaluate the use of radiation given inside the patient’s body during a surgery. In cases where tumor is in a distant location of the body, stereotactic body radiotherapy and radiofrequency ablation may be used.