Conclusion on Advancements in Cancer Treatment

HISTORICAL RESEARCH
Treatment of cancer goes back centuries and developed alongside biologists’ understanding of cancer. In ancient times, cancer was generally thought to be incurable. Treatment up until the late 19th century was mostly nonexistent or a crude surgical removal of a tumor, which often resulted in death due to poor hygiene and non-sterilized tools. In the late 19th century, Theodor Billroth, Sampson Handley, and William Halsted pioneered surgeries to remove tumors and adjacent lymph nodes, with Halsted performing the first radical mastectomy in 1882, a procedure that removed the entire breast, all lymph nodes under the arm, and the chest wall muscles under the breast to battle breast cancer. This procedure would become standard practice for decades. The next milestone in cancer treatment came with the discovery of radium, with doctors placing radium on and in tumors to induce remission. Just before the turn of the 20th century, physicians Tage Sjogren and Tor Stenbeck report a case of cancer cured via X-ray therapy, marking the beginning of radiation therapy for cancer treatment.
The 20th century brought an incredible number of advancements in cancer treatment. In 1928, George Papanicolaou developed the pap test, a process of examining cervical tissue under a microscope to determine if it is cancerous; this procedure remains useful in determining whether to remove cervical tissue. David H. Patey modified the radical mastectomy in 1932 to be less disfiguring and replaced the old procedure as standard practice. In 1937, the National Cancer Institute is established, and in the same year, Sir Geoffrey Keynes developed the concept of a breast-sparing surgery followed by radiation therapy via needles of radium administered in the nearby area and lymph nodes. 4 years later, Charles Huggins pioneered hormonal therapy, manipulating hormone levels in the body, to combat prostate cancer. In 1947, Sidney Farber showed the use of antimetabolites, drugs that block important metabolic processes by structurally mimicking key enzymes and chemicals, in creating tumor remissions in children with acute leukemia. Another key milestone came in 1958, when Emil Frei, Emil Freireich, and James Holland pioneered combination chemotherapy: chemotherapy that combines the use of multiple drugs. 1978 brought the introduction of selective estrogen receptor modulators, or SERMs; SERMs block estrogen mediated cancer growth and are used in breast cancer patients. The first monoclonal antibody drug became FDA approved in 1997; monoclonal antibody drugs are a type of targeted cancer therapy that attach to specific part of cancer cells, marking them to be killed by the immune system.
The 21st century continues the discovery and development of anticancer drugs. Many new drugs of preexisting categories as well as new categories of drugs have been developed since the turn of the last century. One category is drugs that prevented cancer from forming in the first, such as finasteride and raloxifene. Several HPV vaccines were developed, which drastically reduce the chance of the patient developing cervical cancer from an HPV infection. In 2010, sipuleucel-T, a vaccine that uses the patient’s own dendritic cells, becomes the first FDA approved human ...