Shining new light on drug design: photoactivated chemotherapy

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About 11M cases of cancer are diagnosed each year and there is a pressing need for new anticancer drugs. The world’s leading anticancer drugs are platinum-based compounds such as cisplatin. These types of platinum compounds are not targeted to cancer cells and also kill healthy cells. This can result in severe side-effects and the development of resistance, so that some patients stop responding to treatment. Methods for increasing the selective activation of platinum drugs at the site of the tumour are envisaged which address these problems. We have developed new platinum-based drugs which are non-toxic in the dark, but become highly toxic when activated by light. By shining light only on the area of cancerous tissue, we can target the activation of the drug to just the selected area. It is vital that we carry out more studies into how these drugs kill cancer cells, which will involve laboratory work and experiments to investigate if they can shrink/treat cancers. We hope that the wavelengths of light for activating these compounds make them suitable for treating surface cancers and that slight changes to the drugs will allow treatment of a wider range of cancers.