Survivorship in untreated breast cancer patients.

In any disease, the knowledge of the natural history of untreated cases provides a real background against which the real advantages of a new treatment itself are judged. Fortunately, in the present days, there are scant data on outcomes in patients with untreated breast cancer. In an attempt to provide this background against which the virtues of current curative and palliative treatments can be more accurately assessed, we have reviewed the literature regarding published untreated breast cancer series.

Concomitant resistance and early-breast cancer: should we change treatment strategies?

The dynamics of disease recurrence shows a bimodal pattern with a fairly broad dominant peak at about 1.5-2 years after surgery followed by a second peak at about 5 years. Nowadays, this clinical pattern is explained by assuming that primary breast tumours as well as their metastases have phases of both arrested (tumour dormancy) and active Gompertzian growth.

Addition of an induction regimen of antiangiogenesis and antitumor immunity to standard chemotherapy improves survival in advanced malignancies.

Studies have shown that cancer requires two conditions for tumor progression: cancer cell proliferation and an environment permissive to and conditioned by malignancy. Chemotherapy aims to control the number and proliferation of cancer cells, but it does not effectively control the two best-known conditions of the tumor-permissive environment: neoangiogenesis and tolerogenic immunity. Many malignant diseases exhibit poor outcomes after treatment with chemotherapy.

Cancer chemotherapy: a critical analysis of its 60 years of history.

Chemotherapy has already proven widely effective in the treatment of cancer, occupying a prominent place in the current therapeutic arsenal. However, in recent years, there has been a plateau in the evolution of the clinical results obtained with this modality treatment. In some cases, the limitations of chemotherapy observed during the early days still apply.

Multidrug resistance in cancer therapy: role of the microenvironment.

Despite advances in the design of chemotherapeutic agents, and although many of these effective agents are now available for clinical use, most human cancers are resistant to therapy at presentation or become resistant after an initial response. The effectiveness of chemotherapy is compromised by several microenvironmental factors that affect the bioavailability and efficacy of chemotherapeutic agents. These factors vary from one tumor to another, and from one location to another, within the same tumor.