Temozolomide Is Explosive

Somewhat surprisingly, this was NOT filed under "Stuff I Won't Work With"

Sounds like it got off on a technicality:

> I have personally worked with compounds that are this hazardous, but at least I knew up front that they were!

Chemotherapy is basically cave man medicine. That a therapeutic drug is explosive only adds to that sentiment. The idea that we'll basically poison you just up to a point that's nearly fatal in order to kill the cancer is such a terrible way to treat someone. Now I'm not saying don't ever do it -- unfortunately that's where we're at in 2021. It's just kind of unbelievable that cancer remains so elusive that we're still using medical treatments that started from mustard gas usage during world wars, when we're so advanced technologically in so many other ways.

Interestingly, cancers for children are largely successfully treated. I was at a fancy conference a few years ago where some cancer researchers were socializing over wine, and I asked them why that was versus adults. They said the difference was that parents are willing to do almost anything (aka enroll their kids in experimental treatments) to cure their kids, but adults aren't quite so willing for themselves. Thus the rate of experimentation was just so much higher for children to the point where it's often curable. Perhaps one day we'll be able to simulate the body well enough to the point where we can brute force treatments computationally to fix this gap.

Many of the modern treatments are much more targeted, any antibody-based treatment is by nature extremely specific. But then you also have the problem that cancer isn't a single, unified disease, so a very targeted approach doesn't work for every cancer.

I mean, seriously, just look at the molecule. All those nitrogen atoms lying there restless to each go their own separate way:)

I would be surprised if it wasn't.