Cancer Therapies
The main groups of cancer treatment, catalogued from reference sources (NCI, ESMO). Educational overview — treatment decisions always belong to you and your oncology team.
Surgery
Surgery is one of the oldest and most widely used cancer treatments. It is a local treatment that works best for solid tumors contained in one area of the body; it is not used for blood cancers and is not a stand-alone o…
4 therapies in this group
Radiation Therapy
Radiation therapy uses high doses of ionizing radiation to kill cancer cells or slow their growth by damaging their DNA. Cells whose DNA is damaged beyond repair stop dividing or die, so the effect builds up gradually ov…
4 therapies in this group
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy uses drugs that kill cancer cells or stop them from dividing. Because these drugs act on all fast-dividing cells, they also damage some healthy tissues — such as the lining of the mouth and gut, bone marrow,…
4 therapies in this group
Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy is a group of cancer treatments that help the patient's own immune system recognize and destroy cancer cells, which often evade attack by switching off immune responses. According to the US National Cancer …
5 therapies in this group
Cancer Vaccines
Therapeutic cancer vaccines train the immune system to recognize antigens — molecules present on cancer cells but scarce or absent in healthy tissue — and to destroy the cells that carry them. Formally they are a branch …
4 therapies in this group
Targeted therapies
Targeted therapies are drugs that act on specific proteins controlling how cancer cells grow, divide, and spread; the National Cancer Institute describes them as the foundation of precision medicine. Most belong to one o…
4 therapies in this group
Hormone therapy
Hormone therapy slows or stops the growth of cancers that need hormones to grow — chiefly hormone receptor–positive breast cancer and prostate cancer. It works in two ways: by reducing the body's production of a hormone,…
4 therapies in this group
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation restores the body's ability to make blood cells after high-dose chemotherapy or radiation therapy has destroyed the bone marrow. Stem cells given by intravenous infusion settle in …
3 therapies in this group
Other local treatment methods
Beyond surgery, radiation, and drug-based treatment, oncology also uses a group of established local (physical) methods that destroy tumor tissue directly — with heat, extreme cold, light, or electric pulses. They includ…
4 therapies in this group