ABSTRACT
Over the last three decades, there have been a number of advances made in the treatment of haematological malignancies including an increasingly defined role in curative therapy programmes for high-dose chemotherapy (HDC) with stem cell support. This has provided an impetus for similar approaches to be tested in the more common solid tumours of adults. Drug resistance is one of the most important reasons for treatment failure in these diseases, and therefore attempting to overcome it with HDC is an obvious strategy to investigate. This rationale is supported by laboratory data demonstrating that dose correlates with number of cells killed, and that increasing drug doses by 5-10-fold can overcome resistance [1].
