Cancer is the enemy. So, our immediate desire is to get rid of it, throw it away, and never hear from it again. Current therapies that require living tissue are proving that false. We know that your living tumor tissue is like your fingerprint, unique to each individual patient. It contains information specific to you, your genetic make-up, your cancer and ultimately the thought is, your treatment. If kept alive, instead of being thrown away as medical waste in the operating room, it can unlock treatment options that might not otherwise be considered and save patients from side-effects of ineffective treatments.
In today’s world of chemotherapy and targeted cancer therapies, therapy is administered without checking to see what would happen first. After the pathologist cuts the cancer into chunks, those pieces, though dead, are preserved within blocks of wax. A fancy meat cutter then slices off very thin pieces of the tumor so that the pathologist can examine it under the microscope. From that analysis, and from information about what happened to other patients with similar, but certainly not identical, problems in the past, the physician then decides how to treat the cancer of that individual patient.
This treatment method works about half the time. Well, to be specific, in cases in which drug therapies are the mainstay, such as for cancers of the lymph nodes and the blood — the lymphomas and leukemias — they really do provide significant benefit. On the other hand, most of the benefit from modern cancer care for solid tumors comes from the surgical and/or radiation oncologic interventions. The actual additional incremental survival benefit from chemotherapies or targeted therapies in solid tumors over that provided by surgery or radiation is generally in the single percentage point ranges.
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