What is resistance in cancer treatment, and how are researchers working to overcome it?
Understanding the challenge
When treatments are met with resistance, cancer cells adapt and become unaffected by the medicines designed to treat them. Resistance is a common challenge in oncology today.
If a cancer becomes resistant to treatment, it can return and even progress—or come back even more aggressively than before. When this happens, the cancer might become difficult to treat. Because of that, treatment resistance, is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths.
Researchers at Pfizer are working to develop ways to treat cancer from multiple angles—using different modalities, combinations, and technologies to help overcome resistance.
How does resistance develop?
Resistance can be unpredictable. It can develop within a matter of days after starting a treatment, or it may take years.
Resistance may occur naturally or emerge as a response to treatment. Understanding the different ways resistance can develop is the first step in overcoming it.
A tumor is made up of many different cancer cells, each with a variety of factors that determine whether a treatment will work. Because of this variety, within each tumor, the cells that are sensitive to the treatment might die off, while the insensitive ones remain, forming tumors that, in time, may not respond to treatment. This is one way cancer treatment resistance occurs.
Looking to the future
Cancer treatment is not one-size-fits-all. Researchers believe one possible way to overcome or delay the development of resistance is to treat patients with combinations of different types of cancer medicines. Another approach is to treat patients with medicines that are specifically designed to block the particular mechanism of resistance their tumors have developed.
Pfizer is focused on developing innovative treatments with the potential to address treatment resistance in new ways.
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