Many cancer medicines are builtx around chemotherapy. Chemotherapy causes individuals to experience both significant physical and mental stress and has given great hopes. Additionally, not all cancer cases respond to treatment as effectively as they should. Chemosensitivity testing seeks to identify these cancer cell resistances before the start of therapy, helping in avoiding unsuccessful chemotherapies.
What is Chemotherapeutics and Chemotherapy?
Cells that divide uncontrollably and too quickly become cancerous. Chemotherapeutics, or medications that target and kill rapidly dividing cells, are hence a staple in cancer treatment. When planning chemotherapy, doctors today have access to a large variety of powerful chemotherapeutics with various modes of action. It can be difficult to select from these the most effective drugs for treating a specific case of cancer. This is because the patient’s unique characteristics might affect the treatment’s effectiveness. It could also be because of the type of tumor.
According to the origin tissue and stage of the malignancy, current cancer therapy guidelines aim to categorize cancer patients. They subsequently get cancer medication that will benefit each of these groups the most. Depending on the type of cancer, the patient gets chemotherapy in standardized combinations. This id done to maximize efficacy and reduce unfavorable drug effects.
Attributes of cancer treatment – chemosensitivity and chemoresistance
However, chemotherapy administered in accordance with the recommendations is not always equally successful. Unique conditions have an effect on cancer. Additionally, even in tumors with a similar origin, a patient’s cancer cells’ chemosensitivity (susceptibility to a chemotherapeutic) may vary. Chemosensitivity, a characteristic of cancer cells, refers to the intensity of the tumor’s response to a certain anticancer treatment. It details how a tumor responds to this chemical. It also includes how severely a medical professional puts its growth to a stop and/or whether treatment causes the cells in the tumor to die. Chemosensitivity in cancer is hence a requirement for chemotherapy’s effectiveness.
The opposite of chemosensitivity and chemoresistance. A chemo-resistant tumor can continue to develop even in the presence of a chemotherapeutic it is resistant to. This behavior is very much like that of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Therefore, utilizing this medication for chemotherapy would not be a wise choice. Fortunately, it is uncommon for malignancies to defy every possible form of treatment. Therefore, if the chemoresistance shows up in advance, workable alternatives are easier to find We want to assist you with this in some way.
Direct Chemosensitivity testing
Doctors use the same techniques also “chemosensitivity assays,” to evaluate both chemosensitivity and chemoresistance. They check if the patient’s cancer cells may continue to divide and survive while being on a treatment with chemotherapy. There is a >95% chance that the source tumor is likewise resistant to the tested chemotherapeutic if cancer cells exhibit chemoresistance in a chemosensitivity experiment. Chemosensitivity assays excel at precisely predicting these resistances (or, more fitting: chemotherapy resistance assays). The likelihood of a favorable clinical response considerably increases by only providing chemotherapy agents that could inhibit the development of cancer cells in a chemosensitivity experiment.
In a chemosensitivity experiment, cancer cells that exhibit chemosensitivity imply that the source tumor is also susceptible to the chemotherapeutic under test. However, because no diagnostic test can yet fully imitate therapy resistance in the human body, medical professionals cannot predict chemosensitivity of the source tumor from chemosensitivity assays with the same accuracy as chemoresistance.
Different chemosensitivity assays identify cancer cells that have survived. The Chemotherapy-Resistance-Test (CTR-Test®), is our method of choice. It counts the quantity of freshly generated DNA to determine if there is a division in the cells from a tissue while chemotherapeutics treat them. This assay is extremely selective to cancer cells since normal (non-cancerous) cells do not divide in it, rendering them invisible to the test. Other tests, which are more likely to be biased since non-cancerous cells are still alive, measure the amount of ATP (an unstable chemical utilized to transport energy in living cells).
Indirect Chemosensitivity testing
All chemosensitivity assays described above require living cancer cells. Yet, stored and dead tumor samples can – if acquired recently – still hold information about the chemosensitivity of the tumor they originated from. In this case, professionals can extrapolate chemosensitivity from analyzing biomarkers; – characteristic biological features of the tumor which the doctors can associate with therapy outcome. By assessing relevant biomarkers for multiple therapies, a medical professional can generate individual profile of the tumor for predicting therapy efficacy.
Chemosensitivity Assays in Targeted Cancer Therapies
Doctors increasingly use chemotherapies for cancer are in conjunction with or in substitute of so-called targeted cancer therapies. Drugs used in targeted therapy precisely target one of the genetic changes (mutations); that cause uncontrolled cell proliferation and the development of cancer in previously healthy tissues. As a result, targeted medications are better than chemotherapeutic drugs at telling cancer cells apart from healthy cells. They have less side effects, are better targeted at cancer cells, and can be quite powerful in the fight against the disease. But only if the cancer being treated has the precise mutations the medicine is meant to treat.
As a result, the existence of a select few particular mutations has a significant impact on the (chemo)sensitivity of cancer cells to a targeted therapy. Consequently, it’s crucial to customize the therapy to the patient. Doctors can use the same techniques outlined above for chemosensitivity testing to determine the likelihood of response in targeted cancer therapy.
Conclusion
Indirect efficacy assessment is already done for a number of recent targeted therapy medications by analysis of selected molecular-based biomarkers because therapeutic effectiveness is heavily dependent on a few unique mutations. Direct efficacy tests for certain medications are also being developed or are already available.
