Treating cancer with drugs is known as chemotherapy. These anti-cancer drugs are used to kill the cancer cells. Currently cytotoxic drugs are generally referred as to ‘chemotherapy’, affecting the fast dividing cells. Basically the chemotherapy drugs start impeding the cell division. There are many ways this could be achieved, one would be by duplicating the DNA or separating the recently created chromosomes, etc.

Mostly chemotherapy targets all rapidly dividing cells. By doing this it also damages the normal cells, but then the normal cells can repair the DNA damage where as the cancer affected cell cannot. Therefore chemotherapy damages the healthy tissues like the intestinal lining which has a high replacing rate, but eventually they repair themselves. Sometimes certain drug works better in some combination with another drug rather than alone, this is known as combination chemotherapy.

Generally leukemia and lymphoma require a high dosage of chemotherapy with total body irradiation (TBI). The bone marrow is destroyed during this treatment and so is ability of the body to recover. Blood stem cell harvesting is done prior to this cancer treatment so as to allow recovery after the treatment is over. This process is commonly known as autologous stem cell transplantation.