Main description:

This comprehensive, ground-breaking title presents, in simplifying style, the driving and organizing principles of cancer, making this multidimensional, highly complex disease easily understandable for readers. Developed out of the renowned author's many years of teaching a widely popular, several-hundred-student college course, this 12-chapter book begins with an account of the history of cancer as a medical and public health problem, as well as the major milestones and setbacks in the ongoing quest to understand the wide variety of cancers that continue to impact the world. Subsequent chapters then address pathogenesis, incidence and mortality statistics, risk factors, causal factors, screening challenges and victories, treatment strategies, and disease prevention approaches. This wealth of clinical information is further supplemented with socioeconomic discussions on the financial, social, ethical, technological, regulatory, political, and logistical challenges that limit progress in cancer research. A soon to be gold-standard text that thoroughly and expertly describes cancer as a composite, adaptive system, Cancer: The Enemy from Within equips and empowers all undergraduate students and graduate students to better understand this continually perplexing disease. Clinicians across all disciplines may also find this work of great interest.

Contents:

1. The nature and origins of cancer

Cancer as a family of diseases coming from normal cells using normal cell traits in abnormal ways

Cancer as a developmental process

Organization / taxonomy of the neoplasias/ terminology

2. Principles of cancer initiation, promotion and progression

Mutation, growth, clonal heterogeneity

Principles of cancer pathology: form and function and deviation from normal

Key concepts of invasion and metastasis

3. Behavioral hallmarks of cancer

Key behavioral traits that allow cancer cells to outcompete normal cells

Molecular basis of these key behaviors

Cancer as an evolutionary system

Caner as a complex adaptive system

4. History of cancer - how did we get here?

Transformative discoveries

Major advances in cancer biology, etiology, and treatment - foundations for current thinking and present day practice

5. Who gets cancer and why?

Cancer epidemiology worldwide

Causal risk factors

Non-causal risk factors

6. Screening

Why do it?

What does it take?

What works and what are the recommendations?

7. Diagnosis and Assessment

Detection and diagnosis

Classification: type, grade, stage, molecular features

Prognostic factors, predictive factors and treatment planning

8. Localized treatment of cancer

Principles and types of oncologic surgery

Principles and types of radiation therapy

Other ablative therapies

9. Systemic therapy

Cytotoxic drugs

Hormonal therapies

Targeted therapies

Immunotherapies: (+CAR-T genetic engineering) current reality, future vision

Therapy as selective pressure and the emergence of resistance

Principles of therapy: efficacy, toxicity; cost-benefit

10. End of Life Issues: Personal and Medical

Palliative care: what it is and how it is used

Overuse of therapy at end of life

Hard decisions: when to stop treatment

11. Development of new cancer therapies: evolution and revolution

The ethical, economic, and scientific aspects of translational cancer research

Regulatory requirements

The evolution of clinical trials

12. Cancer and society

Cancer and the law: Right to Die; Right to try

Cancer as big business

Economics of cancer care delivery: Who pays and for what? Who decides?