Reading time: 5 minutes Chris Wang Chemotherapy is a mainstay of cancer treatment, yet many times it is temporarily withheld or stopped due to significant toxicity. This is because chemotherapy drugs cannot differentiate between killing cancer cells and killing fast growing healthy cells, such as cells in your bone marrow. These cells divide quickly because... Continue Reading →
Why Cancer is Hard to Treat
Reading time: 4 minutes Daniel Zhong Before we believe headlines proclaiming “Cancer is cured”, it is crucial to understand that developing a therapy that universally cures all cancers is highly unrealistic as our knowledge surrounding mechanisms of cancer progression advances. While we do have non-curative treatments for some types of cancer such as chemotherapy and... Continue Reading →
A New Paradigm for Cancer Drug Development
Reading time: 4 minutes Brittany Avin McKelvey We are in a hayday for cancer therapies, as research has surpassed traditional chemotherapeutics. New drugs, new treatment regimens, and even new drug classes are approved each day, broadening the horizons of oncology. The newest types of drugs to recently gain FDA approval are tissue agnostic drugs. (See... Continue Reading →
Cancer Cell Metabolism: A Potential Therapeutic Target
Reading time: 5 minutes Aishwarya Subramanian The life cycle of cells is a key piece of our understanding of cancer; as cells grow, they divide and produce two new “daughter” cells. For the cells to divide, grow and survive, it requires energy which they gain by metabolising glucose. However, every healthy cell that divides has... Continue Reading →
How does a drug get approved?
Reading time: 5 minutes Bekah Schulz The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is often criticized by patient advocacy groups for taking too much time to approve life-saving drugs. However, the FDA is a difficult situation; if they approve a drug too quickly and it turns out to be unsafe/ineffective, then people are upset. If they... Continue Reading →
Many Anticancer Targets Could Be A Mirage
Reading time: 4 minutes Kedar Puvar Designing new anticancer compounds is often a deliberate process, where the mechanism of action involves the blocking of a certain target, like a receptor or other cellular protein. Researchers would then optimize potential leads until a potent and effective drug is ready for clinical trials. This pipeline is considered... Continue Reading →
DNA G-Quadruplexes: Special Secondary Structures with Surprising Anticancer Implications
Reading time: 5 minutes Jessica Desamero From the start, our mission here at OncoBites has been to share the complicated nature of cancer with our readers and to shed light on breakthroughs in understanding and treating the disease. One of our biggest messages has been that “cancer” is really a family of different but related... Continue Reading →
Two New Cancer-Fighting Compounds, Brought to You by Mushrooms
Reading time: 3 minutes Kedar Puvar At first glance, mushrooms, being immobile and nutritious, seem to be rather unassuming. Why, then, would you want to turn to mushrooms of all things as a source of new medicines? It turns out that they make up for their evolutionary weaknesses with a powerful toolbox of molecular defenses... Continue Reading →
Going on the offense: PROTACs as cancer therapy
Reading time: 3 minutes Kedar Puvar Diseases are typically caused by defective or malicious proteins. Traditionally, treatments for these diseases use a strategy of inhibition - use a small molecule that can block the offending protein from carrying out its function and thereby, bring things back to normal. But what if we went one step... Continue Reading →
Human Organ on a Chip: A Better Model for Drug Development?
Reading time: 5 minutes Kaye Alcedo Even before President Nixon’s declaration of the “war on cancer” in 1971, the journey towards a cure was nothing but a rollercoaster ride. Many promising cancer drugs are tested in human clinical trials but ultimately fail primarily because they demonstrate inadequate efficacy or safety, costing billions of dollars, increasing... Continue Reading →