Within a cancer, there are several cells competing with each other.
The typical way to treat cancer is to declare war: attack tumors with the greatest violence that the patient can endure, in order to eliminate as many cancer cells as possible. For scientists at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida, they decided to try something radically different with mice suffering from two types of breast cancer: used small doses of drugs in order to kill only some cancer cells and leave others alive. There were slowly decreasing the dose further.
The surprise came then: mice so treated lived much longer than those faced conventional chemotherapy. 80% of worms that experienced the new approach had their tumors so low that could stop the treatment, whereas rats that experienced high dose chemotherapy did not show any reduction in the tumors in the long term.
It was only a single search, and involving mice. But the surprising result put a flea in the ear of everyone: are we doing everything wrong in cancer treatment? Should we stop trying to settle the tumors and, instead, use subtlety to keep them under control?
Scientists from Florida said yes - and they are based on the theory of evolution to say that. Today, we treat the tumor as an enemy to be attacked with the maximum brute force. "We tend to see cancer as a competition between the tumor and the host, but when we look into the tumor, what we see is that cancer cells are competing with each other," said Robert Gatenby, the leader of the research, a interview with Time magazine. When we attack the whole tumor, what happens is that we killed most of these cells. Only those that remain are just resistant to treatment. The problem is that they can then return to multiply: and thus the tumor rise again, this time totally resistant to chemotherapy.
The method developed by Gatenby team based on computer models similar to those used for making agronomists pest control. Instead of giving a cannon shot in the whole plantation, what they do is a more subtle attack, to reduce the population of pests, but not exterminate all those who are sensitive to the insecticide. So they know they can plan a new attack if the infestation again appear.
This is exactly what was done with mice: low doses of chemotherapy kill some cancer cells but left other living - and not just those that are resistant. Thus, the tumor is not resistant to treatment and is slowly decreasing in size - and also dangerous. At first, this new approach does not dramatically reduces the tumor, but over time it becomes easier to keep it under control. Perhaps the tumor never disappear completely - just as many farmers learn to live with small populations of predators eating their crops - but he does not kill the patient.
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