Question: What are the current advancement in cancer treatment

Ryan Ellison answered on 28 Nov 2025:

Great question! One way that cancer treatments advance is in making treatments that are more speciifc, meaning they have less side effects. For example, a cancer treatment you might have heard of is called chemotherapy. This works by damaging the DNA in the cells of your body, meaning that the cells die or can’t reproduce. Since cancer cells reproduce very quickly, this damages cancer cells more than the healthy cells of your body. However, because chemotherapy is not targeted, if effects all cells. The side effects of this can include making you feel sick.
More modern therapies tend to be targeted to the cancer in some way, which means they typically have less side effects, and can be more effective. An example of this is by taking a medicine similar to chemotherapy, but attaching it to an antibody. These are normally used by the immune system and are very specific in what they attach to. By using an antibody that is specific to a cancer-related protein, you can target a medicine to a cancer. In fact, cancer medicines which end in “ab” e.g. pembrolizumab use antibodies in this way!