Radioactive drugs strike cancer with precision

On a Wednesday morning in late January 1896, at a small light bulb factory in Chicago, a middle-aged woman named Rose Lee found herself at the heart of a groundbreaking medical endeavor. With an X-ray tube positioned above the tumor in her left breast, Lee was treated with a torrent of high-energy particles that penetrated into the malignant mass.

“And so,” as her treating clinician later wrote, “without the blaring of trumpets or the beating of drums, X-ray therapy was born.”

Radiation therapy has come a long way since those early beginnings. The discovery of radium and other radioactive metals opened the doors to administering higher doses of radiation to target cancers located deeper within the body. The introduction of proton therapy later made it possible to precisely guide radiation beams to tumors, thus reducing damage to surrounding healthy tissues — a degree of accuracy that was further refined through improvements in medical physics, computer technologies and state-of-the-art imaging techniques.

But it wasn’t until the new millennium, with the arrival of targeted radiopharmaceuticals, that the field achieved a new level of molecular precision. These agents, akin to heat-seeking missiles programmed to hunt down cancer, journey through the bloodstream to deliver their radioactive warheads directly at the tumor site.
Black and white photo shows a woman in a gown with an X-ray tube in front of her. Part of her face is covered in order to direct the X-ray beam to the site of the cancer on her face.

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