What if oncology could take a page from crop science?

When dealing with cancer that has spread beyond the original tumor, medical dogma has long been to blast it with as much chemotherapy as patients can handle. But just as overuse of pesticides stokes resistant weeds and extraneous antibiotic treatment breeds superbugs, what if too much chemo is doing patients harm?

As STAT’s Sharon Begley reports, that’s the hypothesis at the heart of a heretical trial underway at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. Dr. Robert Gatenby is presiding over a study in which patients with advanced cancer get only a fraction of the standard dose of chemo.

The idea is to combat resistance by keeping some chemo-susceptible cancer cells alive. That, Gatenby figures, will keep chemoresistant cells from proliferating, possibly making the next round of treatment more likely to be effective.

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