Introduction

The medical management of childhood cancer is complex. And gets more complex everyday with the discovery of new agents targeting different aspects of the cancer cell.

It would be difficult for a surgeon to read the entirety of this topic from start to finish. More appropriate would be to review the general principles of the types of agents used in today’s ubiquitous combination therapies. Multimodal therapy using surgery and radiotherapy is used to control local disease and chemotherapy to eradicate microscopic and metastatic disease. The goal of multimodality treatment is to cure the patient of their cancer.

Additonally, a surgeon could search this topic when a pateint under their care is being treated with an agent with which he or she is unfamilar.

content in this topic is referenced in SCORE Chemo/Radiation Therapy, Immunotherapy Concepts, Genetics overview