After over half a century of chemotherapy research, cancer remains one of the most difficult life-threatening diseases to treat, a consequence of factors which include limitations of animal models, tumour diversity, drug resistance and side effects of therapy. This introductory overview gives a brief perspective on the discovery of historical cytotoxic and anti-hormonal drugs, and then highligh…
The development of chemotherapy in the 1950’s and 1960’s resulted in curative therapeutic strategies for patients with hematologic malignancies and several types of advanced solid tumors. These advances confirmed the principle that chemotherapy could indeed cure cancer and provided the rationale for integrating chemotherapy into combined-modality programs with surgery and radiation therapy …