What everybody wants to know, of course, is how insights from physics might translate into effective therapies that can kill cancer cells (figure 3). Most existing cancer treatments involve trying to remove a tumour surgically or destroying it with radiation, cou- pled with chemotherapy in which a variety of drug regimes try to stymie cell division, block problematic gene pathways or retard angiogenesis. Although drug design is informed by an understanding of molecular and cell biology, it is still something of an art, depend- ent on long and costly clinical trials. Indeed, oncolo- gists are often in the dark about why certain drugs actually work, or why normal dose–response relation- ships do not.
