In many ways, it's more effective than many of the chemotherapy drugs. Also, I could see that physicians in this field had a real academic life as well. They spent half of their time taking care of patients and then maybe half of their time doing cancer research or radiation research, and research was very important to me. As succinctly as I can summarize it, head and neck cancer involves cancers of the mouth, nasopharynx, larynx, tongue, and tonsils, and these are among the most rapidly proliferating human tumors. These cancers really move quickly once they're diagnosed.
Radiation is a curative type of treatment for patients with head and neck cancer.
Like so many cancers, if the tumors are fairly small, radiation is quite good at knocking them out. If the tumors are very big, then often radiation isn't enough to knock them out. The key feature that spurred my research interest was the speed of tumor growth. Typically, radiation for a curative case might be delivered over seven or eight weeks, where you get one treatment a day, Monday through Friday. However, because these tumors are growing so quickly, as you spread the treatment over seven or eight weeks, not only do you have the tumor cells that are there on day one that require killing, but you also have those tumor cells that survive each fraction of radiation doubling and repopulating during treatment.