• Question: How do you make new anti-cancer drugs from sugars that don’t kill healthy cells?

    Asked by Ethan to Steven on 14 Nov 2016. This question was also asked by Lewis Hughes.
    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Hi Ethan,

      Good question! It has quite a complicated answer though! Sugars are highly active inside our bodies, and so you can attach sugars like glucose to your drugs to help them travel around the body. Also, because sugars have lots of OH or alcohol groups on them, we hope that they will help us to selectively bind to the 4 stranded DNA sequence that I am trying to target.

      The DNA I am trying to bind to stops an enzyme called telomerase from working, which 90% of cancers use to immortalize themselves. Normal human cells don’t have this telomerase enzyme, so in theory should be unaffected.

      What we are hoping is that the glucose and mannose sugars I am using help the drugs to go to cancer cells over healthy cells, there they can bind to the DNA, helped again by the sugars alcohol groups, and inhibit telomerase selectely, thereby killing the cancer cell and leaving the healthy cells alone!

      Hopefully that makes sense? 🙂

      Steve

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