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New drugs to target cancer
A NEW range of drugs is being developed to target specific cancer cells, bringing fresh hope to millions of families blighted by the nation's No 1 killer. A "phenomenal" advance means experts understand more about tumours than ever before.
Following a major genetic breakthrough a decade ago, it has been possible to unravel genes that fuel cancers which kill more than 150,000 people a year in Britain.last night Professor Ghulam Mufti, a leukaemia expert at King's College London, said that understanding the genetics of cancer will soon lead to new, more targeted treatments for many patients. He believes that if the progress continues as quickly as it has done the drug treatments could be widely available within the next decade.
He said: "The genetics of cancers are being rapidly unraveled. We are soon going to have a library of what genetic abnormalities lead to which cancers. If these are specific, we can target these abnormalities using new treatments."
The research is moving forward so quickly that over the past two years scientists have begun to create detailed "maps" of the genetic glitches that occur in certain types of tumors.
They have found that cancers in different parts of the body may be triggered by the same genetic faults and could therefore be treated using the same drug. They have also found that breast cancer patients, for example, may have different triggers for their disease and so require very different treatments. This will allow doctors to offer patients tailor-made drugs.
Some of these drugs are already available in Britain. Women with breast cancer can get treatment based on whether their tumors were triggered by their genes.
But the British experts are now looking at other ways to tackle cancer based on genetics. A drug undergoing trials at London's Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre works by attacking cancer cells' inability to repair their own damaged genetic structure.
Project leader Professor Alan Ashworth tells tonight's BBC2's Horizon program: "Some tumor cells can't repair their DNA properly.'
"They just carry on growing fast. So we've worked out a way of trying to exploit that to treat cancer."
The drug in development, which has no side effects, given at a low concentration lets healthy cells survive but destroys cancer cells. Prof Ashworth said: "All mutant cells are killed but normal cells are not touched. So potentially that translates into much more powerful treatments with fewer side effects as we're not killing normal cells."
Prof Ashworth said: "We are in the 21st century. We've got the human genome sequence and yet we're still treating cancer with medieval treatments. We cut it out with a big knife or burn it with radiation or poison it with chemotherapy."
"There is nothing clever about it at all. What we're trying to do is use the genome information to develop new ways of treating the cancer itself, the genetic defects of the cancer, not the normal cells."
Understanding the genetics of cancer was made possible 10 years ago when scientists first mapped all three billion "letters" that comprise the entire human genetic sequence.
Scientists are now comparing "healthy" genomes to those of cancer and pinpointing what genetic faults cause these tumors to grow.
Tonight's Horizon program also features a medical trial of a drug to cure cystic fibrosis using a similar method of gene therapy that could be available on the NHS in just five years. It works by replacing the faulty gene that causes cystic fibrosis with a healthy man-made version, inhaled via a nebulizer.
Professor Eric Alton, of the Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium and Imperial College London, said the research would be completed by the end of 2012.
He said: "If this first trial looks good then we can move it quite rapidly into the NHS and within two or three years might be able to put it into regular treatment."
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