Shining new light on drug design: photoactivated chemotherapy

每年约有1100万例癌症被诊断出来，人们迫切需要新的抗癌药物。世界领先的抗癌药物是以铂为基础的化合物，如顺铂。这些类型的铂化合物不针对癌细胞，也会杀死健康细胞。这会导致严重的副作用和耐药性的产生，使一些患者对治疗停止反应。设想了在肿瘤部位增加铂类药物选择性激活的方法，以解决这些问题。我们已经开发了新的基于铂的药物，这种药物在黑暗中无毒，但在光激活时会变得高度有毒。通过只照射癌组织区域，我们可以将药物的激活定向到选定的区域。至关重要的是，我们必须对这些药物如何杀死癌细胞进行更多研究，这将涉及实验室工作和实验，以调查它们是否可以缩小/治疗癌症。我们希望，激活这些化合物的光的波长使它们适合于治疗表面癌症，并且希望药物的轻微变化将允许治疗更广泛的癌症。

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.