Hello Asare Joseph

Immunotherapy, a type of targeted therapy is one of the latest advances in cancer treatment. It helps to re-engage the immune system so that the body can help identify and eliminate cancer.

This treatment falls into various categories such as:

Improvement in chemotherapy would be to find new ways of delivering chemotherapeutic drugs such as encasing them in fat bubbles to cushion absorption or latching them onto proteins that seek out tumors and avoiding healthy cells. For instance, drug delivery systems offer the potential to improve the therapeutic index of chemotherapeutic agents via targeting the antitumor drug to its desired site of action, and hence, increasing the drug concentration in cancer cells and decreasing its concentration in healthy cells. It may offer several advantages, such as protection from degradation in the bloodstream, better drug solubility, enhanced drug stability, targeted drug delivery, decreased toxic side effects and improved pharmacokinetic. In a way these will help patients undergo chemotherapy with fewer side effects.

As examples, there are several nano-sized drug carriers, such as nanoparticles, liposomes, micelles and polymer-drug conjugates which are been investigated to enhance the antitumoral drug efficacy in cancer therapy.

Another exciting treatment protocol in relation to chemotherapy would be the Pressurized Intraperitoneal Aerosol Chemotherapy (PIPAC) to treat specific advanced abdominal cancers. In PIPAC, chemotherapy drugs are directly delivered into the abdominal cavity as an aerosol, targeting and concentrating the treatment on tumors in this area. However, PIPAC is still considered a relatively new and evolving technique. Clinical trials and research are ongoing to determine its long-term effectiveness and safety compared to traditional treatment approaches. Another new approach is the use of hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC), which delivers heated liquid chemotherapy to the abdomen where it can target certain cancers that have spread in the abdominal cavity. HIPEC would work well for cancers of the colon, appendix, ovaries, stomach and cancer of the lining of the peritoneum, called mesothelioma.

So, the current improvements in cancer treatment would focus on improving its effectiveness and reducing some of the side effects from the treatment.

Best.

Currently there are lots of approaches, but unfortunately the money seems to swing dramatically towards what's currently the most trendy approach. This results in the loss of funding for older approaches that are being refined with significant improvements. Unfortunately the people who make the decisions either aren't the brightest, or have large conflicts of interest and just fund their colleagues quid pro quo.

Here are two of our approaches that were abandoned when our lab was closed down due to lack of funding.

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