Question

Watch the video How Cells Divide and How Chemotherapy Works and answer the following questions:

• What does it mean that the chemotherapy treatment is nonspecific?
• Find an example of a specific method of a treatment for cancer. How does it work?

Answer 1

Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells anywhere in our body

Chemotherapy aims to kill cancerous cells with medication that target rapidly dividing cells. Some chemo drugs binds to DNA exactly when the cell is making a copy of its DNA by preventing this stage the drugs stops cell from dividing. The drugs can also help shrink tumors, but the side effects can be severe. Chemotherapy treatment is nonspecific because some Chemotherapy medicines can kill a cell during any phase of the cell cycle and other Chemotherapy medicines kill cancer cells only during a certain phase. They are also able to work in the resting phase as well as actively dividing cells.

Some people with cancer will have only one treatment. But most people have a combination of treatments. Such as surgery with Chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Radiation therapy uses high power energy beams to kill cancerous cells. It can be done from a machine outside the body or it can be placed inside your body. Another methods are immunotherapy, targeted therapy or hormone therapy etc... Immunotherapy is newer type of cancer treatment uses medication to rev up the patients own immune system to fight cancer.. Another effective treatment are bone marrow transplant, cryoablation etc..