Killing cancer cells, twice with one shot

摘要

I can still remember lecturing that chemotherapy and radiotherapy are effective because they kill cancer cells. That was simple enough, and when I wanted to make it a bit more complex, I ventured into explaining how they mainly killed cancer cells because they divided much more than other cells, and how the killing involved apoptosis. Things have moved on quite a bit since then. Evidence accumulated in the past few years indicates that some anti-cancer drugs do not kill cancer cells, but merely push them into senescence, some do kill cells but not via apoptosis, and some do kill cells via apoptosis but that is not the main ingredient in their efficacy.