What are the different types of drug therapy for cancer?
Chemotherapy uses many drugs. In general they fall into 3 categories: antimitotic drugs hormones and hormone inhibitors biological therapy. Most of the chemotherapy drugs are antimitotics. This means that they stop cancer cell growth by stopping cells from dividing into more cells. There are many ways that scientists have found to do this, so there are now many different kinds of these drugs. They include names you may have heard: Adriamycin (doxorubicin), Cytoxan (cyclophosphamide), and 5FU (5-fluorouracil. Hormone therapy plays a very important role in chemotherapy, especially if you have breast or prostate cancer. Sex hormone inhibitors are used to treat tumors that grow better with the hormones estrogen and testosterone. (These are hormones that naturally occur in the body.) The inhibitors stop the hormones from helping the tumor grow. Two commonly used hormone inhibitors are tamoxifen, which blocks female hormones in breast cancer, and finasteride, which blocks testosterone in men
