Every year, a large number of people through out the world die of cancer. Though there has been much advancement in discovering new drugs for treating the disease, the current therapies have a number of side-effects that at times assume deadly proportions.
The prevalent chemotherapy treatment for cancer tumors has a serious side effect of killing healthy cells besides the cancer cells. A new research — conducted jointly by researchers from the Universities of Warwick, Edinburgh, Dundee and Czech Republic’s Institute of Biophysics — has discovered new platinum compound that could be the future photoactive chemotherapy for the treatment of malignant cells.
The new Platinum compound can only be activated by light and can be easily targeted on cancer cells. It has been found to be 80 percent more effective than the current platinum-based drug.
One of the problems in destroying the cancer cells using the current drugs relying on photodynamic therapy is that they require significant amount of oxygen to be present within the cancer cells. However, cancer cells mostly are devoid of oxygen that render these drugs ineffective. The new Platinum compound has solved this problem– oxygen deficiency cannot turn it ineffective.
Image: uab
Source: biology news