Cancer Treatment

Hi in this video, I'm going to be talking to you about cancer treatments. So there are many different types of cancer treatments that kind of summarize them in this crap for you or this table for you. So let me go through a couple of them first there's the traditional therapies. These are the ones who are most used to surgery, radiation chemotherapy surgery just removes the tumor and radiation. Chemotherapy work by damaging the D. N. A. Which will hopefully lead to the death. Then you have a second class called immunotherapy and this involves using immune system things. So passive immunotherapy uses antibodies against tumors to kill them. So tumor antibodies we introduce those to either the cells of the body and those target the tumors for death. Then you have active immunotherapy which is different because active immunotherapy sort of provides the patients with certain molecules or drugs that will stimulate their own immune system to either produce those antibodies or to kill the tumor in some way. So passive is just sort of giving the body some immune system and active is stimulating the person's own immune system. Then we have anti angiogenic these are working on destroying the blood vessels that can support tumor growth. And then finally we have molecular targeting and these are small molecules are just drugs that target specific cancer causing genes. So we say you know this tumor has one type of mutation, let's develop a drug or give them a drug that will target that one mutation. So these are becoming really important sort of you know this buzzword of personalized medicine of you know finding that exact treatment that will help to treat your tumor, your tumor mutation, your tumor type. But unfortunately we all know that cancer cells develop resistance against the treatment. And so this happens for every treatment And there's a lot of different ways that a cancer cell does this. But one of the most important is through multi drug resistance. So multi drug resistance is when a cancer cell exposed to one treatment actually can develop resistance or not respond to multiple treatments. Even treatments it's never been exposed. So how does it do this? Well there's this one gene called the MDR one gene and this gene encodes for an abc transporter. Remember we talked about this is the type of transport transport things into or out of the cell. And um when the cell becomes resistant to one it can actually amplify this gene over express this gene. And when there's a lot of MDR. One this on the surface it will actually take those drugs these cancer killing drugs and transport them out of the cell and therefore they can't do their work and they make them insensitive. So this is what this looks like. So if we have a cell here and we have this MDR one Jean This is m. d. r. one then we treat the cell with some type this is a tumor cell. We treat it with you know chemotherapy or radiation or antibodies or whatever. So it's these black dots here. This is the cancer treatment. Now, normally this is going to get into the cell if it's been designed, well, we're going to get this in the cell. The problem is is that the MDR one transporters actually take this up. Use a different color, take this up so fast and export it out that it can't do its function because it's it's being exported so quickly out of the south that it can't work. So that is a big way that cancer cells develop. Resistance is not the only way, but it is a big one. Especially multi drug resistance. Um So with that let's not move on.