Management

Main article: Management of cancer

Many management options for cancer exist including: chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, immunotherapy, monoclonal antibody therapy and other methods. Which treatments are used depends upon the type of cancer, the location and grade of the tumor, and the stage of the disease, as well as the general state of a person's health.

Complete removal of the cancer without damage to the rest of the body is the goal of treatment for most cancers. Sometimes this can be accomplished by surgery, but the propensity of cancers to invade adjacent tissue or to spread to distant sites by microscopic metastasis often limits its effectiveness. Surgery often required the removal of a wide surgical margin or a free margin. The width of the free margin depends on the type of the cancer, the method of removal (CCPDMA, Mohs surgery, POMA, etc.). The margin can be as little as 1 mm for basal cell cancer using CCPDMA or Mohs surgery, to several centimeters for aggressive cancers. The effectiveness of chemotherapy is often limited by toxicity to other tissues in the body. Radiation can also cause damage to normal tissue.

Because cancer is a class of diseases,^[83][84] it is unlikely that there will ever be a single "cure for cancer" any more than there will be a single treatment for all infectious diseases.^[85] Angiogenesis inhibitors were once thought to have potential as a "silver bullet" treatment applicable to many types of cancer, but this has not been the case in practice.^[86]

Experimental cancer treatments are treatments that are being studied to see whether they work. Typically, these are studied in clinical trials to compare the proposed treatment to the best existing treatment. They may be entirely new treatments, or they may be treatments that have been used successfully in one type of cancer, and are now being tested to see whether they are effective in another type.^[87] More and more, such treatments are being developed alongside companion diagnostic tests to target the right drugs to the right patients, based on their individual biology.^[88]