What is chemotherapy?

 What is chemotherapy? We all toss the name around like we know what's going on with our friends, but how do these life-saving poisons actually work?

 Chemotherapy is a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to kill fast-growing cells in your body. I'll highlight the two chemotherapy drugs I'm receiving for my triple positive breast cancer (see my previous post for my two targeted therapy drugs and how they work.)

 The first is Carboplatin which is an alkylating agent. 

From cancer.org, "alkylating agents keep the cell from reproducing (making copies of itself) by damaging its DNA. These drugs work in all phases of the cell cycle and are used to treat many different cancers, including cancers of the lung, breast, and ovary as well as leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin disease, multiple myeloma, and sarcoma. Because these drugs damage DNA, they can affect the cells of the bone marrow which make new blood cells." 

The other medication is Doxetaxel (aka Taxotere) which is the class of taxanes and is a mitotic inhibitor.

From cancer.org, mitotic inhibitors are also called plant alkaloids. They are compounds derived from natural products, such as plants. They work by stopping cells from dividing to form new cells, but can damage cells in all phases by keeping enzymes from making proteins needed for cell reproduction.

 

Now that that's clear as mud, it's truly fascinating to learn about the way the different chemotherapy drugs. I hope everyone didn't think I could truly turn this magic into full layman's terms, but I did my best with the help of cancer.org.

TL;DR

• Chemotherapy drugs work in very different ways and the two chemo drugs I'm on, Carboplatin and Taxotere, are an alkylating agent and a mitotic inhibitor, respectively.
• Alkylating agents keeps the cell from reproducing itself by damaging its DNA.
• Mitotic inhibitors work by stopping cells from dividing to form new cells.