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New Cancer Drug ´Targets DNA with Fewer Side-Effects´
By Lyndsay Moss, Health Correspondent, PA News
A major new cancer drug which targets specific parts of DNA could lead to patients suffering fewer side-effects and responding better to treatment, experts said today.
A human trial of the drug - called SJG-136 - is under way among 30 terminally-ill patients whose tumours had stopped responding to normal chemotherapy.
It could eventually be used to treat a wide variety of tumours, such as breast, ovarian, brain, leukaemia, bowel and skin cancers.
Scientists hope that the treatment could be more widely available within three to five years.
It could also mean that patients are subjected to less treatments that have no effect, saving the NHS money.
Details of how the drug works were being explained to cancer specialists at Cancer Research UK's Senior Researchers Meeting in Harrogate today.
The drug has been developed by Cancer Research UK scientists in London and has undergone early tests in the US.
Professor David Thurston, from the School of Pharmacy at the University of London, said the drug worked by "handcuffing" certain parts of the DNA with the potential to interfere with the rduction of cance.
But at the same time it would leave healthy cells alone, meaning it could eventually lead to patients suffering fewer and fewer side effects such as nausea, tiredness and hair loss associated with conventional chemotherapy.
"A whole lot of drugs that are used now work by influencing DNA but it's like a shotgun, it goes everywhere.
"It attaches to the healthy cells as well.
"We are trying to make it more selective, more like a bullet which attaches itself only to the cells which need to be targeted," he said.
Prof Thurston said that in lab tests using the drug had made a brain tumour disappear and other types of cancer had been reduced "quite substantially".
Initial trials of the drug, involving patients in London and Edinburgh, will focus on safety and dosage before later tests look at what cancers the drug is most effective against.
Prof Thurston said they hoped to get to a point with the drug, much further down the line, where it was able to target a single gene, with the potential to eradicate the debilitating side effects that cancer patients can experience.
"It has been a long-held goal of drug designers to develop novel compounds that target certain sequences of DNA in cancer cells, and SJG-136 is a unique drug that we think may do this," he said.
The drug has been developed by CRUK, the UK biotech company Spirogen and the National Cancer Institute in the US.
It has now been licensed to global pharmaceutical company Ipsen where its development will continue.
Prof Robert Souhami, CRUK director of clinical and external affairs, said the development of drugs that recognised gene sequences represented the "cutting edge" of molecular therapeutic research.
"We have high hopes for this drug but it is very early days and there will be a lengthy process of testing before this drug finally reaches patients.
Richard Sullivan, head of clinical programmes at CRUK, said: "It's extremely exciting when you do get a new molecule in clinical trials.
"There are so many that don't make it that far," he said.