New age anti-cancer drugs

Due to harsh side effects and long term damaging effects on patients, scientists and researchers are looking out for ways to develop milder cancer drugs. These drugs are termed as the “new age” anti-cancer drugs.

Although, Chemotherapy is known to be the only treatment for cancer up till now and assumed to be highly effective with regard to its results on cancer patients, it is in general equally toxic to the healthy cells of the body as much as it is to the cancer cells, causing severe harmful effects. These effects include vomiting, hair loss, nausea, kidney and liver problems and at times everlasting damage to growing cells, particularly in the reproductive system.

This serious concern has led scientists to research and find ways of customizing drugs, so that they only eliminate the effected cells and do not harm the healthy cells and tissues.

These new drugs, which scientists, after conducting years of study and research, claim that they do not damage healthy cells, on the contrary, they take a more targeted approach. These novel drugs only aim at the cancerous cells and change the biology of the disease at a molecular level.

There are hundreds of types of cancers, all of them respond in a different manner to different treatments. Some cancers work together with protein in the body, some with ion channels or enzymes, yet others with membrane receptors.

As a part of these treatments, a combination of therapies is to be devised for improved outcomes, researchers will now be using antibodies in cancer treatments. Doctors, researchers and scientists have been conducting studies to understand cancer at the molecular level, now, as they state is the time to use that information to efficiently modify the usage of antibodies to certain mechanisms in cancerous cells.

As a result, doctor’s will be able to treat their patients according to the best suited treatment, by choosing from a combination of treatments with much lesser and a reduced amount of side effects.

According to doctors and researchers, the efficacy of cancer treatment is only as good as the disease target one goes after, therefore, they are working in collaboration with the drug discovery researchers at early stages to discover aspects of biology which can be interfered upon to have positive impact on the disease.