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Types Of Therapies For Cancer Treatment Essay

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INTRODUCTION

There are many different types of therapies for cancer treatment. Chemotherapy is the most common and following that is immunotherapy. A recent method has been discovered that is a targeted therapy. The recent discovery of targeted therapies has offered a wealth of improvements in the field of oncology. Targeted therapy is the most recent type of cancer treatment that uses drugs to attack solely cancer cells while trying to minimize the damage to normal cells. Targeted therapies attack the programming inside cells, what sets them apart from healthy normal cells. A recent targeted therapy of Poly (ADP-ribose) polymerases (PARPs) have been revealed to provide an alternative therapy for cancers that involve mutations in the genes: BRCA1 and BRCA2. These two genes are involved in repair of double stranded break (DSB). When either gene is mutated, the change can lead to errors in DNA repair that can cause cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerases (PARPs) are enzymes that have been recently recognized as critical regulators of cell survival and cell death. Drugs that inhibit PARP-1 help fight cancers caused by mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2.

MECHANISM OF ACTION

A research group in France discovered that flooding BRCA gene deficient cells with DSBs leads to cell death, and to do this they increased the number of SSBs thereby blocking the enzyme Poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase. Blocking this enzyme using various drugs is what is

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