Can We Fight Against Cancer

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Cancer is a disease that arises from cells in a part of the body starting to grow out of control. It is one of the most common causes of death, taking nearly 7 million lives each year worldwide. Approximately one-half of men and one-third of women in the world are diagnosed with different cancer types at some point during their lifetimes. More than one-third of deaths occur within five years after a cancer diagnosis. As cancer comes to be a serious life-threatening disease to human, then, what strategies can we use to fight against it? We should start with the background knowledge on what cancer and cancer treatment is as well as its traditional definition. The first description of cancer in related literature is found in an Egyptian Edwin Smith papyrus and dates back to approximately 1600 B.C. It …show more content…
Instead, immunotherapy is the treatment that uses certain parts of a person’s immune system to fight cancer cells by inducing and enhancing anti-tumor immune response. Researchers suspected that the human immune system could recognize tumor cells and affect the growth of cancer for a long time. An American surgeon, William Coley (1982-1936), first noted that getting an infection after surgery seemed to help some cancer patients. Then, he started to use certain kinds of bacteria to treat his cancer patients by infecting them. Although some patients had better therapeutic effect, his technique was shadowed over the radiation therapy. Yet the researchers do not forget his effort. They have learned a great deal about the immune system and how it might be used to treat cancer. Nowadays, immunotherapy has been successfully reported to retain a low tumor regression rate (2.6-3.3%) in 1205 patients with metastatic cancer who underwent different types of active specific immunotherapy (Rosenberg 1984). It is believed to impact how we treat cancer without side effect in the

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