Keeping cancer at bay with frequent low-dose chemotherapy might be more effective than trying to destroy it, a study has found.
The unconventional approach suggests cancer patients may have a better chance of survival living with their disease while keeping it under control.
Current cancer treatments often involve aggressive treatment with high-dose chemotherapy in an attempt to wipe out as many tumour cells as possible.
But complete eradication of cancer is rare, and the toxic side-effects of chemotherapy can be highly destructive - not only leading to hair loss, nausea and extreme fatigue, but also crippling the body's immune system or triggering anaemia.
The new "adaptive therapy" (AT) strategy is designed to oppose the evolutionary forces that drive cancer resistance.
It involves adjusting drug doses to suit tumour response. Rather than trying to eradicate a tumour, the treatment seeks to stabilise it by allowing a small population of drug-sensitive tumour cells to survive.
A team of US scientists led by Dr Robert Gatenby, from the H Lee Moffitt Cancer Centre and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida, conducted tests using the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel to treat mice with two kinds of breast cancer.
They found that between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of the mice could be weaned off the drug completely over an extended period without suffering relapses.
Writing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researchers said: "Our results suggest that this adaptive therapeutic strategy can be adapted to clinical imaging and can result in prolonged progression-free survival in breast cancer."
