Here’s some eye opening info… Cancer chemotherapy treatment is a type of drug therapy that usually involves a combination of drugs administered under a specific regimen. A round of chemotherapy kills 99.9% of the cancer cells.
Isn’t that impressive? 99.9%!!!
So why aren’t people getting cured from cancer all the time? Well, in a disseminated, metastatic cancer, there are about one trillion cancer cells. That’s 10^12. Or in other words 1,000,000,000,000 tumor cells.
- If you subtract 99.9% from 100%, we are left with 0.1%.
- So what is 0.1% of a trillion?
- 0.1%/100 = 0.001.
- 0.001 x 1 trillion = 1 billion
- 0.1%/100 = 0.001.
- So what is 0.1% of a trillion?
So 0.1% of one trillion is ONE BILLION! Even though the chemotherapy is killing 99.9% of the cancerous cells (and lots of the normal, rapidly growing human cells as well), we are still left with a billion cancerous cells! 🙁
So how come we’re able to get so close to 100% but we’re not hitting 100%?
A cell needs to be replicating or active in some way to be affected by a drug. The cells that are not being affected by the chemotherapy are in the dormant phase. Antibiotics work on the same principal as well. If a bacteria is dormant or replicates very slowly, then the antibiotics can’t affect it.
And I’ll end this post with a relevant comic from XKCD…
