As a Nutrition/Pre-Pharmacy student at the University of Arizona, I am highly intrigued when medical studies performed there offer hope to trauma patients and survivors. Most recently, as featured on the University's home page (http://www.arizona.edu/), there has been progressive work in new therapies for cancer patients. The story discusses Laurence H. Hurley's prediction that groundbreaking chemicals to be used to kill cancer cells could be introduced to the public in as little as three or four years. The fascination progress being made at the impressive school provides hope for the cure for cancer and the entire field of medicine.
Read the full article below.
New Drug Therapies Can Turn Off Cancer Cells
After more than a decade of following a novel research path, a UA College of Pharmacy scientist is poised to see his work pay off with a new class of breakthrough drug therapies aimed at the elusive ability to kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells.
Laurence H. Hurley, the Howard Schaeffer Endowed Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences, estimated that the development of chemical agents to control the growth of or kill cancer cells may well result in treatments that could reach the public in three to four years.
"For years, cancer patients have been pumped full of poisonous cytotoxins to kill cancer cells," Hurley says. "But this conventional treatment has also resulted in the death of the surrounding healthy cells."
Typically, chemotherapy drugs target proteins responsible for a cancer's growth. But Hurley's study of DNA has found new ways to attack the disease.
"My longtime objective was to find a way to target oncogene or cancer gene expression using small drug-like molecules," he says. "Oncogenes can help turn a healthy cell into a cancerous one. So the Holy Grail in cancer research has been to target the on/off switch mechanism that controls oncogenes."
Hurley's study of DNA quadruplexes is paving the way for a new class of cancer drugs. Quadruplexes are four-stranded structures found on the single-stranded ends of chromosome telomeres, where replication of DNA in cells takes place.
"Under certain circumstances, DNA's duplex strands open up to form single-stranded regions and result in quadruplexes," Hurley says. "Our research group began to make real progress in identifying a new molecular target when we began looking at DNA as not only a static molecule that has a defined structure, but thinking about DNA as an exceedingly dynamic molecule that can form many different structures as it writhes, twists and untwists."
Hurley's research team used a number of techniques, including molecular modeling, to come up with molecules that would target these new nuclear receptors very selectively.
"Our mission is to find a way, with small drug-like molecules, to be able to target the switch mechanism that controls the oncogenes that can turn off a cancer cell, Hurley said. "We've discovered a new way to target this on/off switch that came from a fresh understanding of the nucleic acid itself, like DNA, which, under certain dynamic stresses, forms unusual globular structures that look like ‘knots.'
"What we now know is that these knot-like structures are in areas of the DNA that control the switch mechanism. And with that understanding, we have been able to design molecules that selectively target these globular structures," he says.
"We figured that, if these structures were in the ends of chromosomes of cancer cells, we could target them and preferentially kill cancer cells over normal cells," he says. "So we've worked toward designing and making molecules that interact with these ‘knot-like' structures to disrupt the events that happen at the ends of chromosomes, which are critical for cell reproduction."
Hurley's research ideas initially were met with skepticism from the research community, funding entities and scientific journals, but they now have embraced his findings.
"In recent years, hundreds of other scientists have cited our work published in Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science," he says.
Found at: http://www.arizona.edu/features/new-drug-therapies-can-turn-cancer-cells
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