Brock chemistry researcher Mukund Ghavre wrote a piece recently published in the St. Catharines Standard about the impact Canadian hero Terry Fox has had on cancer research being done at the University.

Ghavre writes:

While the earliest reports of cancer chemotherapy date back to the second half of the 19th century, serious research around chemo began in earnest during the Second World War.

Since that conflict which ran from 1939 to 1945, thousands of anti-cancer agents have been prepared and tested against various strains of the disease. Some of these are natural products, others are synthetic (man-made) compounds developed from natural products.

Simply put, cancer is the uncontrolled growth of animal cells.

Cancer is not one disease. The word is a loose term used to describe a group of more than 200 diseases. That means that every type of cancer is different, therefore their causes can be different and, thus, their treatments will be different.

Likewise, different types of cancers will interact differently with the anti-cancer drugs. This creates a hurdle in finding one effective drug against cancer. Additionally, drug resistance shown by cancer stem cells, or the asymptotic and metastatic nature of malignant cancer, pose difficulties in cancer treatment.

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