Timeline of Cancer Treatment
How cancer has been treated, from an Egyptian surgical papyrus of about 1600 BCE through radical surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and hormone therapy to targeted drugs and cell-based immunotherapy approved in 2024.
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- Medicine & Health
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- 33 events ~1600 BCE – 2024
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~1600 BCE: Egyptian papyrus describes tumors of the breast
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Egyptian surgical text copied from an older original, sets out 48 cases, mostly injuries. Its Case 45 describes "bulging tumors" of the breast, cool to the touch, and concludes that there is no treatment. It is often cited as the oldest written description of what may have been breast cancer, though a modern diagnosis cannot be confirmed from the text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Smith_Papyrus~400 BCE: Hippocratic writers name cancer after the crab
Greek medical writings collected in the Hippocratic Corpus used karkinos (crab) and karkinoma for certain hard, spreading tumors and ulcers, a name later explained by swollen veins radiating from a tumor like a crab's legs. One aphorism advised leaving hidden cancers untreated, since treated patients died sooner. In the 1st century CE the Roman writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus rendered the word in Latin as cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Corpus2nd century: Galen attributes cancer to black bile
Galen, a Greek physician who practiced in Rome, used onkos (swelling) for tumors in general, the root of the word oncology, and taught that cancer arose from an excess of black bile collecting in one part of the body. Repeated by physicians in Byzantium and the Islamic world, his humoral explanation dominated thinking about cancer for well over a thousand years, until anatomy and microscopy displaced it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen1775: Pott links scrotal cancer to chimney soot
The London surgeon Percivall Pott reported that cancer of the scrotum was common among chimney sweeps, who had been sent up chimneys as boys, and blamed long contact with soot. It was the first report linking a cancer to an occupational exposure; in the 1920s and 1930s researchers produced tumors in mice with soot extracts and identified the cancer-causing hydrocarbons in soot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimney_sweeps%27_carcinoma1804: Hanaoka removes a breast cancer under general anesthesia
On October 13, the Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū performed a partial mastectomy on Kan Aiya, a woman of about 60, after giving her tsūsensan, an oral herbal anesthetic he had spent some 20 years developing. Some historians regard it as the earliest reliably documented operation under general anesthesia. He operated on more than 150 breast cancer patients, but Japan's isolation policy kept his methods from influencing anesthesia elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanaoka_Seish%C5%AB1881: Billroth removes a stomach cancer
In Vienna on January 29, Theodor Billroth removed a cancer at the outlet of Therese Heller's stomach, the pylorus, and joined the remaining stomach to the duodenum. Earlier attempts by Jules Péan in 1879 and Ludwik Rydygier in 1880 had ended in their patients' deaths; Heller lived about four months before dying of liver metastases. Anesthesia and antiseptic technique were making such major cancer operations possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Billroth1891: Coley injects bacteria into inoperable tumors
Prompted by a patient whose inoperable sarcoma had regressed after a streptococcal skin infection, the New York surgeon William Coley began injecting streptococci into tumors, and by 1893 had moved to a mixture of killed Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens, later called Coley's toxins. Some patients had lasting regressions, but inconsistent preparations and no controlled trials left the results disputed; he is seen as a forerunner of cancer immunotherapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coley%27s_toxins1894: Halsted publishes results of radical mastectomy
William Stewart Halsted reported 50 operations at Johns Hopkins Hospital that removed the breast, the chest muscles beneath it and the armpit lymph nodes in one block, on the theory that breast cancer spread outward in an orderly way through the lymphatics. Willy Meyer of New York independently described a similar operation. The radical mastectomy remained the standard US operation for breast cancer until the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_mastectomy1896: Despeignes treats stomach cancer with X-rays
Months after Wilhelm Röntgen announced the discovery of X-rays, the French physician Victor Despeignes irradiated a man with stomach cancer twice a day from July 4; the tumor shrank, but the patient died later that month. Historians regard it as the earliest well-documented radiotherapy for cancer. Emil Grubbe of Chicago later said he had treated a breast cancer with X-rays earlier in the year, but no contemporary record supports the claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Despeignes1896: Beatson reports remissions after removing the ovaries
The Glasgow surgeon George Thomas Beatson reported in The Lancet that removing the ovaries of women with advanced, inoperable breast cancer had made their tumors regress, an approach that grew out of his studies of the ovaries and lactation. It is regarded as the origin of hormonal therapy for breast cancer, and oophorectomy became a standard treatment for advanced disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Beatson1901 – 1903: Physicians begin treating tumors with radium
Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was applied to a skin disease in Paris by the dermatologist Henri-Alexandre Danlos, and two years later physicians in St. Petersburg reported curing a basal cell skin cancer with it. Sealed radium sources placed on or inside tumors became brachytherapy, and radium and X-ray tubes remained the only practical sources for radiotherapy until after World War II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachytherapy1920s: Regaud and Coutard develop fractionated radiotherapy
At the Radium Institute in Paris, the radiobiologist Claudius Regaud found in animal experiments that splitting a dose over several days could destroy target tissue while sparing the skin, and the radiotherapist Henri Coutard treated cancers of the larynx and pharynx with daily X-rays over weeks, presenting cured patients in 1921 or 1922 (accounts differ). Courses of many small daily doses replaced single massive doses and became standard radiotherapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Coutard1941: Huggins treats prostate cancer by blocking male hormones
Charles Huggins, a Canadian-born surgeon at the University of Chicago, and Clarence Hodges reported that removing the testicles or giving estrogen shrank metastatic prostate cancer and relieved pain within days, showing that the cancer depended on male hormones. Androgen deprivation remains a mainstay of treatment for advanced prostate cancer, and Huggins shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Brenton_Huggins1941: Papanicolaou and Traut publish the vaginal smear test
Georgios Papanikolaou, a Greek-born researcher at Cornell, had reported in 1928 that cancer cells could be seen in vaginal smears, a finding the Romanian physician Aurel Babeș made independently with a different method. His paper with the gynecologist Herbert Traut in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and their 1943 monograph, won acceptance for the Pap test, which finds precancerous changes in the cervix early enough to treat them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pap_test1942: Yale team gives nitrogen mustard for lymphoma
Studying chemical-weapon agents under a wartime contract, the Yale pharmacologists Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman found that a nitrogen mustard shrank lymphomas in mice, and on August 27 it was given intravenously to a man with advanced lymphosarcoma, whose tumors regressed for a time. Secrecy delayed publication until 1946. The marrow damage seen in victims of the Bari air raid of December 1943, often cited as chemotherapy's origin, came later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlormethine1948: Farber reports leukemia remissions with aminopterin
Sidney Farber, a pathologist at Children's Hospital in Boston, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that aminopterin, a folic acid antagonist synthesized at Lederle Laboratories under Yellapragada Subbarow, had brought temporary remissions to 10 of 16 children with acute leukemia he had treated. The remissions lasted only months, but no drug had produced them in the disease before, and the related drug methotrexate became a mainstay of leukemia treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Farber1951: Cobalt-60 machines treat their first patients
Two Canadian teams, one at the University of Saskatchewan led by the physicist Harold Johns and one in London, Ontario, built machines that aimed gamma rays from reactor-made cobalt-60 at tumors deep in the body; the first patients were treated in London on October 27 and in Saskatoon on November 8. Cheaper than radium, cobalt units spread worldwide until medical linear accelerators, first used on a patient in London, England, in 1953, largely replaced them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_therapy1956: Li and Hertz cure metastatic choriocarcinoma with methotrexate
At the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Chinese-born physician Min Chiu Li and Roy Hertz reported that methotrexate eliminated widespread choriocarcinoma, a cancer arising from placental tissue. Li kept treating until human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), a hormone the tumor makes, vanished from the blood, and those patients stayed cured; it is credited as the first cure of a metastatic solid cancer by drugs. The NCI dismissed Li in 1957 over the practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_Chiu_Li1957: Thomas reports bone marrow infusions in cancer patients
E. Donnall Thomas and colleagues in Cooperstown, New York, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on infusing bone marrow into six patients receiving radiation and chemotherapy. The grafts did not take, but the study showed that marrow could be collected and given intravenously safely. After tissue typing was developed, his team in Seattle made marrow transplantation a treatment for leukemia, and he shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Donnall_Thomas1967 – 1968: Total Therapy cures about half of children with leukemia
At St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Donald Pinkel's team treated acute lymphoblastic leukemia with combined drugs given in phases of remission induction, consolidation and about three years of continuation, plus radiation and drugs injected into the spinal fluid to prevent relapse in the brain. About half the children in its fifth Total Therapy study were cured, and cure rates at St. Jude later exceeded 90%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Pinkel1970: MOPP combination cures advanced Hodgkin lymphoma
Vincent DeVita and colleagues at the US National Cancer Institute published final results of MOPP, combining mechlorethamine (a nitrogen mustard), vincristine, procarbazine and prednisone, for advanced Hodgkin lymphoma, then almost always fatal. About 80% of patients in its trials reached complete remission and about 60% of those were still free of cancer decades later, showing that drugs could cure advanced cancer in adults. Less toxic regimens later replaced it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPP_(chemotherapy)1971: Tamoxifen shrinks advanced breast cancers in first trial
Doctors at the Christie Hospital in Manchester reported that ICI 46,474, an anti-estrogen made in 1962 at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) during a search for a contraceptive, shrank advanced breast cancers as well as the high-dose hormones then used, with fewer side effects. Approved in the US in 1977 as tamoxifen, it became a standard treatment after surgery for estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer and is often described as an early targeted therapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamoxifen1971: Nixon signs the National Cancer Act
Signed by President Richard Nixon on December 23, the law strengthened the National Cancer Institute (NCI), founded in 1937, giving it a National Cancer Program, a budget sent directly to the president that bypassed the usual review, and authority to establish cancer centers. Lobbying led by Mary Lasker helped pass the act, often seen as the start of the "war on cancer" in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_cancer1977: Cisplatin regimen cures metastatic testicular cancer
Lawrence Einhorn and John Donohue at Indiana University reported that combining cisplatin with vinblastine and bleomycin, in studies begun in 1974, raised the cure rate for testicular cancer that had spread from about 5% to 60%. Cisplatin, whose anticancer use grew from Barnett Rosenberg's 1965 finding that platinum compounds stopped bacteria dividing, won US approval in 1978, and later refinements cured over 90% of good-prognosis patients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Einhorn1981: Milan trial supports breast-conserving surgery
In a trial at Milan's National Cancer Institute from 1973 to 1980, Umberto Veronesi's team randomly assigned 701 women with breast cancers smaller than 2 centimeters to Halsted radical mastectomy or to quadrantectomy, removal of the affected quarter of the breast, with radiotherapy, and found no difference in survival. With Bernard Fisher's US trial of lumpectomy, published in 1985, it made breast-conserving surgery a standard option for early breast cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Veronesi1988: Shanghai team induces leukemia remissions with retinoic acid
Wang Zhenyi's team at the Shanghai Institute of Hematology reported that all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA), a vitamin A derivative, brought all 24 patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia it treated into complete remission (one also needed low-dose chemotherapy) by making the leukemic cells mature. In a 2013 Italian-German trial, ATRA with arsenic trioxide, studied against the disease in Harbin from the 1970s, left 97% of lower-risk patients alive and event-free after two years without conventional chemotherapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Zhenyi1997: FDA approves rituximab for lymphoma
On November 26 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved rituximab, an antibody against a protein on B cells, for relapsed or resistant low-grade or follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the first monoclonal antibody it approved to treat a cancer. It relied on the method for making monoclonal antibodies that Georges Köhler and César Milstein published in 1975, and with chemotherapy it became standard for several B-cell lymphomas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rituximab1998: FDA approves trastuzumab for HER2-positive breast cancer
On September 25 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved trastuzumab (Herceptin), an antibody against human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), for metastatic breast cancers that overproduce the protein. Dennis Slamon, Axel Ullrich and colleagues had reported in 1987 that the HER2 gene was amplified in 30% of the breast cancers they studied and predicted relapse; patients had to be selected by testing their tumors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trastuzumab2001: FDA approves imatinib for chronic myeloid leukemia
The US Food and Drug Administration approved imatinib (Gleevec) in May, about ten weeks after Novartis applied, for chronic myeloid leukemia. Designed at Ciba-Geigy by a team led by Nicholas Lydon and taken into trials by Brian Druker, it blocks the abnormal enzyme made by the Philadelphia chromosome, found by Peter Nowell and David Hungerford in 1960. According to the US National Cancer Institute, patients in remission after two years have a normal life expectancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib2011: FDA approves ipilimumab, the first checkpoint inhibitor
In March the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved ipilimumab for advanced melanoma after a randomized trial reported in 2010 that it extended survival. The antibody blocks cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4), a brake on T cells; James Allison's group had shown in 1996 that such blockade made mice reject tumors, and he shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Tasuku Honjo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipilimumab2014: Japan approves the first PD-1 inhibitor
On July 4 Japan approved nivolumab (Opdivo), developed by Ono Pharmaceutical with Medarex, for melanoma that could not be removed surgically, the first approval anywhere of a drug blocking programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1), a T-cell brake identified in 1992 in Tasuku Honjo's laboratory at Kyoto University. The US approved pembrolizumab in September and nivolumab in December, and such drugs were soon approved for lung, kidney and other cancers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nivolumab2017: FDA approves the first CAR T-cell therapy
On August 30 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) for children and young adults with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia that had relapsed or resisted treatment. Each dose is made from the patient's own T cells, genetically modified to carry a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that recognizes leukemia cells; developed by Carl June's group at the University of Pennsylvania with Novartis, it became the first gene therapy approved by the FDA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisagenlecleucel2024: FDA approves a T-cell therapy made from tumors
On February 16 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to lifileucel (Amtagvi) for advanced melanoma that had progressed after other drugs, the first tumor-derived T-cell therapy it approved. The patient's own tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes are removed with part of a tumor, multiplied in a laboratory and infused back; 31.5% of 73 patients in the main study responded. The approach grew from work by Steven Rosenberg's group at the National Cancer Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifileucel