How much is too much? When treating cancer, it is important to balance a drug’s effectiveness at killing tumor cells with its toxicity to healthy cells elsewhere in the body.

This image of brain tissue shows Cerebellar Granule Neurons (pink), which sustain significant damage when exposed to certain DNA-damaging therapeutics, and surrounding Purkinjee cells (orange), which do not. Researchers are studying these responses to determine the cell properties and repair mechanisms that make different cell types more or less vulnerable to chemotherapy.