The future of breast cancer treatment
The next 20 years will bring more targeted therapy for the treatment of advanced breast cancer, and will most likely see a decline in the use of chemotherapy.
Special drugs will continue to be developed that attack special “targets” that exist only in breast cancer cells. These drugs, we hope, will spare the patient’s normal cells, thus avoiding many of the side effects we have come to expect from chemotherapy.
Drugs with names like PARP inhibitors and MTOR inhibitors will become part of our everyday language, and more drugs that target HER-2 like trastuzumab will be released in the very near future.
Twenty years from now, many things about breast cancer treatment will have changed again. Tomograms may replace mammograms as the standard method of breast cancer detection,surgeons may not need to remove lymph nodes at all, and radiation therapy may become shorter in duration. Perhaps chemotherapy will have become a thing of the past.
Whatever the case, treatments will be better, more patients will be cured, and in every respect, there will be less suffering for patients at every stage of treatment.
Learn more about breast cancer treatment at the Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
Watch conference presentations from the 2011 Life After Breast Cancer conference.
Penn's Abramson Cancer Center is a national cancer center in Philadelphia providing comprehensive cancer treatment, clinical trials for cancer and is a cancer research center. The National Cancer Institute has designated the Abramson Cancer Center a Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of only 40 such cancer centers in the United States.
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