2023-08-03 01:45:53
Researchers have developed a cancer-fighting drug that appeared to wipe out all significant tumors in preclinical research.
A drug containing a molecule called AOH1996 is showing encouraging signs, as it leaves all healthy cells unharmed, according to the “New York Post.” The drug bears the initials of Anna Olivia Healey, a girl born in 1996 who died of cancer aged nine.
“I knew I wanted to do something special for this little girl,” Linda Malkas of City of Hope in California, a cancer research center, said in a statement. She died when she was just nine years old from neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer that affects only 600 children in America each year.
The meeting with the child’s family was significant for the researcher.
“I met Anna’s father when she was terminally ill,” she said. He asked me if I could do something about neuroblastoma and he wrote a check for $25,000 to my lab.
The drug AOH1996 therefore represents the fruit of two decades of research for Linda Malkas.
The pill works by targeting a protein called PCNA.
“PCNA is uniquely altered in cancer cells, and this allowed us to design a drug that only targeted the form of PCNA in cancer cells, while leaving healthy, normal cells intact,” he said. she explains.
The drug AOH1996 is currently undergoing a phase 1 clinical trial in California. Recent developments of the drug raise hopes that it may one day treat cancers of the breast, prostate, brain, ovary, cervix, skin and lung.
The PCNA protein had never been targeted in the past, according to City of Hope associate research professor and lead author of the study, published in the journal Cell Chemical Biology, Long Gu.
“Protein had never been considered in the past,” he said. We will now dig deeper to understand the cancer drug development process.”
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