Cancer Killers

Because it is finals week (another semester and three courses nearly behind me) and I hardly have time to track down interesting stories, I offer you two words and their brief definitions.  I saw these in an article that I read a year ago and am re reading now.  You see, it made very little sense to me a year ago and is much more helpful now.  The article is not about cancer treatment, but research designs.  The words were just used to provide an example of when a drug worked in one condition but not in another. 
Before I came back to school, many of my posts were related to disease causes and medications to treat them.  I know that I talked about drugs that target tumors - and the different class of drugs that do so.  With that back story, you might get why the example provided in the chapter was a "oh that's cool": moment for me.

Here are the two words as drug types and what they mean:

cytotoxic
cytostatic 

Now that I have read the definitions and I look at the words - I can almost guess the meaning - maybe you can too. Here is a clue - 
Cyto stands for cell (in biology speak)
Both drugs address tumor growth but in different ways...

Ok - well toxic - pretty much anything that is toxic will kill you, so cytotoxins kill tumor cells

Think of the word static - if you are static - it means you are not moving or growing -
cytostatics stop cells from growing - or delay their growth by manipulating the environment (fluids etc) around them.

That was fun for me!  Hope you enjoyed it too - now back to that assignment......