Cancer Essay

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More than 1 in 3 people in the UK will develop some form of cancer during their lifetime (1). This shows how important treating cancer is, in the best way possible.
Cancer is a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. Cancer cells have certain traits, they divide rapidly by stopping the dividing signals, they move to different organs, become immortal since no tumour suppressor gene to tell when the cell needs to die. In addition, cancerous cell also creates their own blood vessels for oxygen and nutrients which is essential for the growth of the cell and is also known as angiogenesis. There are various ways of treating this, one is through localised treatment; surgery where you work on the cancerous areas of the organ. Another localised treatment is radiotherapy which beams gamma rays or x-rays used for the cancer treatment (1). Chemotherapy is also a conventional treatment of cancer; this is a systemic type of treatment this means that it goes all around the body, and has certain drugs which stop the process of cancer cells from developing. For example the cyclophosphamide drug binds the DNA during replication of the DNA. However this has many side effects because it is systemic, it also targets the other rapidly dividing cells like the red blood cells which explain the side effects of having anaemia (2). A solution to this problem would be to create specific drugs for that cancer cell; through personalised medicine. Personalised medicine means tailoring a medicine specific to the patient depending on their cancer’s genetic makeup, using antibodies is a type of this. Another form of personalised medicine is by using magnetic Nano-particles to make the treatment more localised to act as...

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...treat this cancer I would use antibody to EGFR attached to nanoparticles and inject it in the cancerous area. The nanoparticle consists of iron oxide and use the iron particle in an alternating magnetic field. This field will generate heat, and cause the cancer cell to burst.
This will reduce the size of it and most important will be a localised treatment thus the antibody can recognise the cancer cell and cause fewer side effects in comparison to the conventional way. Unfortunately some side effects can still occur; one of the main factors is that the nanoparticles injected can spread to the normal, healthy cells causing damage and side effects like headaches. However it is still more effective because in conventional therapy all parts of the body is effected like hair loss, fertility loss etc. But this is much more localised making it much more effective (25).

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