Developed under the supervision of Professor Marie Ranson at the University of Wollongong's Faculty of Science Medicine and Health in the Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute, the drug belongs to a new class called "prodrugs." Prodrugs, unlike chemotherapy, only target cancer cells -- not healthy cells.
"Current chemotherapy targets all fast-dividing cells. This is why people can lose their hair and get very nauseous, because the drugs attack fast-growing hair and gut cells as well as cancer cells," Harris explained.
"We are working on a new method of actively delivering a large amount of our prodrug through a different pathway into the cancer cell. We hope that this will be able to demonstrate, for the first time, an increase in therapeutic effectiveness and a decrease in toxicity associated with chemotherapy treatment of cancers.