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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

#61

Post by entropicdrifter »

ncann wrote: post #59
isoprophlex wrote: post #12

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…

> I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see desperate, sick, rich people try this out on themselves, skipping FDA approval I know nothing about the FDA but for things like terminal cancer treatment, shouldn't there be a blanket exemption for "if the patient so wish, they can take whatever drugs they want even if unapproved"? When facing certain death, what's the worst that can happen? You die a bit sooner?

The illegal part wouldn't be putting the chems into your body, but selling or giving such chems to someone when you know they're planning to ingest them

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

Octokiddie wrote: post #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.

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by megaman821 »

bfrog wrote: post #9

Amazing if true, and can't be released soon enough. In the US this will likely be a million dollars or something insane, because its the US.

If it costs pennies a pill and you are trying to sell it for a million dollars, that is a surefire way to get murdered by a mob. I would just sell the patent to the government for a hefty profit and be done with it.

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

#64

Post by tough »

ncann wrote: post #59
isoprophlex wrote: post #12

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…

> I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see desperate, sick, rich people try this out on themselves, skipping FDA approval I know nothing about the FDA but for things like terminal cancer treatment, shouldn't there be a blanket exemption for "if the patient so wish, they can take whatever drugs they want even if unapproved"? When facing certain death, what's the worst that can happen? You die a bit sooner?

It seems like a great way to allow a system that it's known to exploit desperate people to do so selling all kinds of miraculous treatments that don't have to even have a relic of science on them.

Having cancer already sucks enough, having businesses and whatnot vulturing over your condition to sell you shit that doesn't work wouldn't really make it better?

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

#65

Post by adebiase44 »

ncann wrote: post #59
isoprophlex wrote: post #12

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…

> I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see desperate, sick, rich people try this out on themselves, skipping FDA approval I know nothing about the FDA but for things like terminal cancer treatment, shouldn't there be a blanket exemption for "if the patient so wish, they can take whatever drugs they want even if unapproved"? When facing certain death, what's the worst that can happen? You die a bit sooner?

There is compassionate use: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/managing-cancer/making-treatme....

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

#66

Post by eigenvalue »

isoprophlex wrote: post #12

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…

This sounds very exciting, and I liked reading your intuitive, almost tangible appreciation of the particular molecular structure. You speak of the components like they are old familiar friends! As someone who doesn't know much at all about chemistry or biology, I had what I thought was a very fascinating discussion about your comment with GPT4 which you might find cool:

https://chat.openai.com/share/28d9b203-1cb5-405b-a109-0f5042...

Basically I wanted to see if your comment, along with the detailed description of the molecular structure, could lead the AI to guess how the compound could be useful. I then proceeded to drop more and more hints and asked it to use those hints along with the structure to guess at a potential mechanism of action. In any case, it certainly helped explain to me what you were talking about!

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

#67

Post by larkost »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #53
kybernetikos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Derek Lowe had a similar take: "AOH1996 is a very unremarkable-looking molecule - to be honest, it looks like the sort of stuff that you used to see in old combinatorial chemistry libraries in the late 90s and early 2000s, a couple of aryl-rich groups strung together with amide bonds." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-mode-cancer-tr...

A key sentence: “I hope that human cancers will prove vulnerable to this new mode of attack in the clinic, and that they are not able to mutate around it with new forms of caPCNA too quickly, either.” Even if this does prove effective in humans, eventually cancer cell defenses will evolve to get around it.

I don't think that evolve is the right word here. It is not that cancers generally will develop to the point where this is no longer useful in humans. In a single human it is possible that some collection of cancer cells mutates in a way that makes them resistant or immune from this effect (e.g.: by not having the mutated PCNA), and so that strain will become the dominant cancer in that one person. It is also possible that this pathway is pretty common, and this drug does not help out much because of that. But because cancer is not spread (outside of some rare cases), this is not really going to "evolve" like viruses do.

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

#68

Post by elgenie »

teruakohatu wrote: post #37
isoprophlex wrote: post #12

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 linked thread that follows explains it in layman's terms.

The drug developers noticed that (a class of) cancer cells involve a shape change in the molecule that clamps on to DNA strands for the purposes of replication and repair. The molecule targets that shape change and thus prevents (a class of) cancer cells from being able to maintain and replicate their DNA.

Cancel cells die and can't replicate = no cancer.

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

#69

Post by pastor_bob »

The patent appears to belong to City of Hope[0], a non-profit cancer hospital.

Conspiracy idea: such a simple drug is not what Big Pharma wants, thus was never investigated.

Hopefully, if effective, it's affordable for people worldwide.

[0]https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2017049206A1/en

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

#70

Post by whymauri »

isoprophlex wrote: post #12

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…

This was my reaction, as well. So visually and structurally unremarkable, it's actually elegant in how 'un-exotic' it is. Love to see it!
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