Cancer-fighting drugs

Using reactions to manufacture chemicals is a big industry. Table 1 lists the top eight chemicals made in the United States. Some of these chemicals may be familiar, and some you may have never heard of By the end of this course, you will know a lot more about them. Chemicals produced on a small scale are important, too. Life-saving antibiotics, cancer-fighting drugs, and many other substances that affect the quality of your life are also products of the chemical industry. 

Over the past 15 years, chemists have vigorously investigated the synthesis and reactivity of one important class of cancer-fighting drugs called epothilones (29 and 30), which show more promise in treating stubborn breast and uterine... 

Interestingly, herbs are the raw material of old and new pharmaceutical medication. For example, the herb foxglove is the source for digitalis and the herb salicin is the source for aspirin. The breast-cancer-fighting drug Taxol comes... 

Cisplatin is a cancer-fighting drug that s a square planar platinum molecule (see Chapter 9). It s a relatively small molecule that binds to the backbone of a cancer cell s DNA. It kinks the structure of the DNA strand and prevents it from operating. The cisplatin binds to the DNA at two locations in effect, it acts as a multidentate ligand, or chelating complex (see Chapters 9 and 15 for more details). The chelating effect changes the symmetry of the DNA molecule. It s like cisplatin reaches out with two hands and pulls the DNA in such a way that it can t operate properly anymore. 

Chemotherapy is a treatment used for some types of cancer. The treatment employs anticancer drugs to destroy cancer cells. An important cancer-fighting drug is cisplatin, which is commonly used to treat testicular, bladder, lung, esophagus, stomach, and ovarian cancers. 

Kingston DO Newman DJ. (2007) Taxoids Cancer-fighting compounds from nature. Curr Opin Drug Discovery Dev 10 130-144. 

Kingston DGl, Newman DJ. Taxoids cancer-fighting compounds from nature. Curr. Opin. Drug Disc. Dev. 2007 10 130-144. Gradishar WJ. Albumin-bound paclitaxel a next-generation tax-ane. Exp. Opin. Pharmacother. 2006 7 1041-1053. 

I would next like to ask you a few questions about plants genetically modified to produce pharmaceutical drugs. These plants are modified to produce compounds used in manufacturing vaccines for diarrhea, antibodies to fight cancer, and drugs to treat such illnesses as cystic fibrosis. 

Unfortunately, most anticancer drugs caimot discriminate between diseased and normal cells, so most cancer chemotherapy is accompanied by debilitating side effects. However, because cancer cells divide more rapidly than normal cells, they are harder hit by cancer-fighting chemotherapeutic agents than normal cells are. 

Inspite of all the qualified successes of synthetic drug research achieved in the last four decades to combat infectious diseases of the more than 80,000 different ailments, unfortunately only about one third can be treated with drugs, most of them only symptomatically. The discovery of better, effective and safer drugs is needed to fight the causes of dreadful diseases like cancer, acquired-immuno-deficiency-syndrome (AIDS), arthritis, cardio-vascular diseases, disorders of the central nervous system (CNS), such as Alzheimer s disease and other vital infectious and metabolic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. 

Ji HE, Li XJ, Zhang HY. (2009) Natural products and drug discovery Can thousands of years of ancient medical knowledge lead us to new and powerful drug combinations in the fight against cancer and dementia EMBO Reports 10 194-200. 

The scientists quickly realized that cisplatin could be a useful drug against some kinds of cancer, where cells often divide in abnormal ways. Their studies led to a number of platinum-based anticancer drugs, including cisplatin, which are still used to fight tumors. 

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