New cancer drug aims to shield body from chemo side-effects

Pegged at $100,000 for a course, Adcetris might not be every cancer patient's dream-come-true immediately, but once worked upon, the drug which considerably reduces the side-effects of chemotherapy could be somewhat of a boon for cancer treatment.The New York Times has reported about the case of Fern Saitowitz, a 47-year-old Los Angeles-based mother-of-two suffering from breast cancer, who lost all her hair, was constantly fatigued and saw her fingernails turn black post-chemotherapy.[caption id="attachment_329371" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="A new drug promises to reduce the effects of chemotherapy considerably."][/caption]However, she switched to an 'experimental' treatment which also involved Herceptin, her old chemo drug and a chemo agent. Apart from temporary nausea and short-lived muscle cramps, Fern didn't have to go through her previous ordeal anymore.She turned to T-DM1 developed by Genentech. Adcetris, like T-DM1 has been developed by Seattle Genetics to treat Hodgkin's Lymphoma.NYT says:

By harnessing antibodies to deliver toxic payloads to cancer cells, while largely sparing healthy cells, the drugs are a step toward the “magic bullets” against cancer first envisioned by Paul Ehrlich, a German Nobel laureate, about 100 years ago.

“It’s almost like we’re masking the chemotherapy,” said Dr. Edith Perez, a breast cancer specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.The new drug probably draws upon the recent discovery of a structure of a molecule that would help cancer drugs target tumors directly without causing grievous damage to healthy tissues. ABC News reported about the research published in Nature, a journal brought out by the Duke University School of Medicine, on March 12.Though there are concerns about how effective the drugs could be for all forms of cancer, the NYT report suggests, close to 25 such drugs developed by pharma companies of varied market standings, are already under clinical trial.NYT adds, 'Many of the drugs use technology from either Seattle Genetics, based in Bothell, Wash., or ImmunoGen of Waltham, which supplied the toxin and linker used in T-DM1.'Though the report doesn't mention Seok-Yong Lee's, the Duke University professor's research, the description of the drug almost matches the desired effect of Lee's molecule structure, reported about two moths back.The ABC News report concludes saying, "Lee's research may be very preliminary, but cancer specialists believe if more drugs can act by directly targeting cancer cells, patients have a much better shot at tolerating them." Sounds like T-DM1?