ReviewNature clinical practice. Oncology2009
Why does cytotoxic chemotherapy cure only some cancers?
Review in Nature clinical practice. Oncology, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 113 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Article
- Machine learning-assisted exploration of multidrug-drug administration regimens for organoid arrays.Science advances · 2025Article
- Stackelberg Evolutionary Games of Cancer Treatment: What Treatment Strategy to Choose if Cancer Can be Stabilized?Dynamic games and applications · 2025Article
- Boosting synergism of chemo- and immuno-therapiesActa pharmaceutica Sinica. B · 2024Article
- Review
- p‑STAT3 influences doxorubicin and etoposide resistance of A549 cells grown in anOncology reports · 2023Article
- Valid-NEO: A Multi-Omics Platform for Neoantigen Detection and Quantification from Limited Clinical Samples.Cancers · 2022Article
- Polygodial and Ophiobolin A Analogues for Covalent Crosslinking of Anticancer Targets.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Angiogenesis and chemotherapy resistance: optimizing chemotherapy scheduling using mathematical modeling.Journal of cancer research and clinical oncology · 2021Article
- Chemotherapy Curability in Leukemia, Lymphoma, Germ Cell Tumors and Gestational Malignancies: A Reflection of the Unique Physiology of Their Cells of Origin.Frontiers in genetics · 2020Article
- Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Presenting Initially as Spinal Cord Compression: When Chemotherapy Alone Is Enough.Case reports in medicine · 2020Article
- A systematic analysis of genomics-based modeling approaches for prediction of drug response to cytotoxic chemotherapies.BMC medical genomics · 2019Article
- Repression of Noxa by Bmi1 contributes to deguelin-induced apoptosis in non-small cell lung cancer cells.Journal of cellular and molecular medicine · 2018Article
- Treating hematological malignancies with drugs inhibiting ribosome biogenesis: when and why.Journal of hematology & oncology · 2018Review
- Synthetic analogues of the montanine-type alkaloids with activity against apoptosis-resistant cancer cells.Bioorganic & medicinal chemistry letters · 2018Article
- Chemotherapy curable malignancies and cancer stem cells: a biological review and hypothesis.BMC cancer · 2016Review
- Cancer biomarker discovery is improved by accounting for variability in general levels of drug sensitivity in pre-clinical models.Genome biology · 2016Article
- Isatin derivatives with activity against apoptosis-resistant cancer cells.Bioorganic & medicinal chemistry letters · 2016Article
- Combination cancer immunotherapies tailored to the tumour microenvironment.Nature reviews. Clinical oncology · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Despite frequent responses to chemotherapy, curative treatment remains elusive for the majority of patients with metastatic solid tumors. By contrast, in testicular cancer, gestational choriocarcinoma, Hodgkin disease and high-grade lymphomas, chemotherapy is routinely curative, even for patients who present with widely disseminated disease. In the common advanced cancers, however, over 40 years of cytotoxic drug development has brought no significant change in cure rates. One interpretation is that the intrinsic properties of the malignancies themselves, rather than the qualities of individual drugs or combination therapies, are primarily responsible for their curability with chemotherapy. We suggest that the curability of these malignancies results from an intrinsic 'locked-in' state of sensitivity to proapoptotic stresses in these cells. A common property of such curable malignancies is that they arise from cells that undergo major genetic rearrangements or recombination as part of their normal physiology. The absence of further genetic and epigenetic changes in genes that regulate apoptosis, DNA repair and senescence allows these cells to maintain their intrinsic sensitivity to chemotherapy. This process allows the cells, when challenged with chemotherapy, to undergo the natural apoptotic pathways that contribute to their intrinsic qualities of chemosensitivity and high curability.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.