In fact, it turns out that the body has many defenses against clots forming in the wrong place. These prevent our drugs from working on normal endothelium. We have even purposely mistargeted them, and they didn't clot blood in vessels feeding normal tissue. The researchers also are working on ways to induce unique markers on tumor vessels that could then be safely targeted with a coagulation-inducing drug. Thorpe does not expect that giving tumors strokes will be the single great breakthrough for curing cancer, at least not on its own.
Cancer treatment is accomplished by using multiple overlapping therapies.
The simple fact is that cancer cells are sneaky, and they find a way to evade each single therapy. It's the way the tumor grows. They have their greatest action deep in the tumor mass where the cancer cells themselves are oxygen-starved and relatively quiescent. In Thorpe's scenario, the coagulative drugs would be used to kill the hardest to reach, most difficult to destroy parts of the malignancy. Then some form of chemotherapy or radiation would mop up the outer rim of cancer cells.