Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to kill fast-growing cells in your body. Chemotherapy is most often used to treat cancer, since cancer cells grow and multiply much more quickly than most cells in the body. Many different chemotherapy drugs are available. Chemotherapy drugs can be used alone or in combination to treat a wide variety of cancers. Though chemotherapy is an effective way to treat many types of cancer, chemotherapy treatment also carries a risk of side effects.

Endocrine therapy

The purpose of endocrine therapy, formerly called hormone therapy, is to add, block, or remove hormones. With breast cancer, the female hormones estrogen and progesterone can promote the growth of some breast cancer cells. Therefore in some patients, endocrine therapy is given to block the body's naturally occurring estrogen to slow or stop the cancer's growth. There are two types of hormone therapy for breast cancer: drugs that inhibit estrogen and progesterone from promoting breast cancer cell growth and drugs or surgery to turn off the production of hormones from the ovaries. Hormonal therapies work by altering the production or activity of particular hormones in the body. They are most commonly used to treat breast cancer and prostate cancer. The type of hormone therapy given depends on the type of cancer being treated.

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is also sometimes called biological therapy or biotherapy. It is treatment that uses certain parts of the immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. This can be done by stimulating your own immune system to work harder or smarter to attack cancer cells or by giving you immune system components, such as man-made immune system proteins. Immunotherapy seems to work better for some types of cancer than for others. It is used by itself to treat some cancers, but for many cancers it seems to work best when used along with other types of treatment. Monoclonal antibodies are man-made versions of immune system proteins. Antibodies can be very useful in treating cancer because they can be designed to attack a very specific part of a cancer cell. Cancer vaccines are substances put into the body to start an immune response against certain diseases. We usually think of them as being given to healthy people to help prevent infections. But some vaccines may help prevent or treat cancer. Non-specific immunotherapies boost the immune system in a very general way, but this may still result in more activity against cancer cells.

Molecular targeted therapy

Targeted molecular therapy at KIMS is a type of personalized medical therapy designed to treat cancer by interrupting unique molecular abnormalities that drive cancer growth. Targeted therapies are drugs that are designed to interfere with a specific biochemical pathway that is central to the development, growth and spread of that particular cancer. Because not every cancer develops in the same way in every person, targeted molecular therapy is personalized to the individual. In some cancers the molecular targets are known. But in other cancers these targets are still being identified. In some cases, the same types of cancer have different molecular targets. Identifying the molecular targets in any given patient's cancer requires working closely with pathologists to carefully analyze the cancer pathology.