I was forced to dive headlong into understanding cancer therapy 2 1/2 years ago. It was obvious at the time that this was the correct direction to head, developing an entire therapeutic ecosystem to give the body every possible advantage and assail the disease with every possible disadvantage in order to get the desired outcome.

However, what I saw was a rather bizarre and disturbing fetish in the pharmaceutical and medical communities for ‘monotherapies’. I believe I understand the allure, if you find one thing that works, the proverbial silver bullet, that’s the best case scenario for treatment. It’s also quite obviously the best case for shareholders and investors, but let’s set that aside for now.

For the sake of future patients, I do hope that medicine and regulators deprioritize the search for monotherapies and receive the type of analysis represented in this article with open arms. In particular, I hope that the ’standard of care’ is given some flexibility so that doctors are able to adopt low risk adjunct therapies in order to improve outcomes and the amount of data available for continued research and improvement of treatment plans.