Anticancer Drug Development

Greeks and Romans, one of the oldest and best-known records of civilized medicine was described in the Egyptian ‘Ebers Papyrus’ (circa 1500 BCE), which documented over 700 drugs, mostly of plant origin. Throughout different civilizations humans have relied on nature to accommodate their basic needs, not the least of which are medicines for the treatment of a wide spectrum of diseases from coughs and colds to parasitic infections and inflammation. A sobering statistic has recently shown that a person born in the United States today has a 41% lifetime risk of being diagnosed with cancer. This alarming fact has urged the health care community to identify effective methods of cancer prevention. Cancer cells exhibit deregulation in multiple cellular signaling pathways, yet all cancers share a number of common hallmark capabilities, such as genetic instability, self-sufficiency in growth signals, insensitivity to anti-growth signals, avoidance of apoptosis, unlimited replication, sustained angiogenesis,and tissue invasion and metastasis. Therefore, utilizing specific agents to target single pathways is a tactic that frequently fails in cancer therapy. Genetic instability produces intra-tumoral heterogeneity that enables adaptive resistance. Combination chemotherapy that targets a number of distinct molecular mechanisms is therefore preferable and considered more promising, but the use of multiple agents is often constrained due to corresponding increases in toxicity.

• Share this page
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Last date updated on April, 2024