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Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

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Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#31
post #3

What’s the process for this to be tested and moved onwards toward approved use?

Tbh Since it's a small molecule you can just hire a lab to make a custom synth , I've seen it done a few times,

Formulation is pretty important too. Do they give any detail on that?

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#32
post #16

Temper expectations, in vitro tests are very different than in vivo tests. Arsenic also kills 100% of tumors in vitro. In vitro doesn't answers the question of "can this drug be taken safely" nor "can this drug be delivered to the cancer cells"

I agree that we should still temper expectations (always, forever), but you seem to have missed the other half of the headline: it also seems to work in animal models with no discernible side-effects. Can't say that for arsenic.

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#34

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOH1996 Look at that molecular structure. Incredible. Two amide bonds, a completely unremarkable aryl ether and an unsubstituted naphthalene ring system. No fussy weird metals or bonds that need pampering, no chiral carbon atom in sight. You could probably pay someone a very modest amount of money to end up with kilograms of this stuff, and it would probably not degrade at all under am…

> Two amide bonds, a completely unremarkable aryl ether and an unsubstituted naphthalene ring system. I much prefer your description of the molecule than the one found on its Wikipedia page.

Thanks! Even though I've been in software instead of chemistry for the last 8-or-so years, a structural diagram of a molecule still sings to me of bonds, torsion and symmetry :)

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#35
post #22

I'm not versed in reading biomedical studies, but I'm curious about this. A successful in vitro test would not necessarily mean that the medicine could overcome other biological challenges such as the blood-brain barrier for delivering medication to brain tumors. Is my assumption correct?

> in vitro test

Means nothing for human treatment. It means something to the people working on the drug.

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#36
Given the importance of this medication and it's promising initial data I have no idea why it's not given "warp speed" clearance. We cleared mRNA technology almost overnight in response to the pandemic. I feel like society as a whole has collective amnesia on how this happened. A relatively novel strategy to rapidly produce a vaccine in response to a pandemic was trialed essentially on a global scale. The phase 1/2/3 trials may as well have not existed.

It seems strange to me that we can't give such an important novel drug the same treatment. The population size is smaller than global and the effect would be huge. I would seriously doubt anyone stricken with cancer would hesitate to agree to the same "experimental treatment" paperwork we all got when we were vaccinated.

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#37

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOH1996 Look at that molecular structure. Incredible. Two amide bonds, a completely unremarkable aryl ether and an unsubstituted naphthalene ring system. No fussy weird metals or bonds that need pampering, no chiral carbon atom in sight. You could probably pay someone a very modest amount of money to end up with kilograms of this stuff, and it would probably not degrade at all under am…

Can you explain to a layman why works to kill tumors and not healthy cells?

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#38
It seems to be getting more popular here to link to a twitter blurb, which links to the actual article. In this case, the blurb adds zero to the discussion, if anything adding blatant misinformation.

This is the actual article:

https://www.cell.com/cell-chemical-biology/pdfExtended/S2451...

I recommend replacing the link and the title with what appears on the Cell website.

Re: Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

#39

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOH1996 Look at that molecular structure. Incredible. Two amide bonds, a completely unremarkable aryl ether and an unsubstituted naphthalene ring system. No fussy weird metals or bonds that need pampering, no chiral carbon atom in sight. You could probably pay someone a very modest amount of money to end up with kilograms of this stuff, and it would probably not degrade at all under am…

Can you explain to a layman why works to kill tumors and not healthy cells?

The idea is that cancer cells have this mutant DNA clamp[0], which rallies DNA repair mechanisms in cells. The molecule targets the mutant clamp, disabling repair mechanisms for tumor cells but not healthy cells.

We all should hope that it has high specificity for the mutant PCNA, and doesn't affect healthy cells... clinical trials will investigate this.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proliferating_cell_nuclear_a...

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