There is a cartoon that I keep at my desk. It is of a person telling a cat, “Don’t you dare step outside of this box” – the box being a litter box! I feel this is the way most of the medical community is approaching cancer therapies these days – thinking within the box.
We shoot the radiation where we can see the cancer. We shoot at what we can see, to eliminate it. What we can’t see gets left behind – often at the margins. Some of these residual cells are cancer stem cells, a rare subset that can initiate and sustain tumour growth.
