Child Cancers vs Adult Cancers

This week in ISM I finalized my paper work with Nurse Curran and I am looking forward to our first mentor visit in the future. This week, I also learned more about immunotherapies in children verse adults through research. This was an interesting topic for me to pursue in research as I am focusing on specifically child cancer immunotherapy therapy in my original work. An amazing statistic that really stuck out to me was that there are about 11,630 diagnosed child cancers and over 1.6 million diagnosed adult cancers. This is important in treatment because child treatment is simplified adult treatment. This is logical in reasoning that an adult dosage of medicine cannot be given the same to a child.

I also learned that immunotherapy is paired with other forms of treatment such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. The placement of proteins is very important in the process to weaken the cancerous region and eliminate the spread of cancerous cells. For more aggressive types of cancer, this is where other treatment would be used such as chemotherapy to kill off cancerous cells in the weakened region.

In the upcoming week, I hope to research more about specific child cancers and the difference in the activity of cancer cells as opposed to adult. Also, I hope to learn about the long-term effects different treatments have on surviving patients.