Cancer has been considered as a serious illness since long. Many researches are in progress to find an effective solution for this life threatening disease. A latest study finds out an anti cancer drug that can travel through the blood stream.
Cancer is a life threatening disease that slowly affects the major organs of the body. The patients have to undergo tremendous pain and suffering. Although there are treatments available, most of them are to palliate the sufferings of the patients and not for complete cure.
Hence, there is a need to find an effective medicine that can fight against cancer and help in curing the patients. Many studies are being conducted to meet this objective.
Recently, a study was conducted by scientists at John Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. They have found out a new anti cancer drug that can travel through the blood stream and act on cancer cells without affecting the normal cells.
Science speaks
The researchers have developed the anti cancer drug from a weed like plant called Thapsia Garganica, which is commonly found in the Mediterranean area.
Their study shows that this drug can obliterate cancer cells while leaving the normal healthy cells unaffected. They called this drug G2O2 and this drug was administered for a three day course in their study.
It was found that the drug could reduce the size of human prostrate tumors grown in mice by almost 50 percent in a period of 30 days. The performance of this new drug seemed to be better that the existing chemotherapy drugs.
How does the drug act?
According to the study report, the drug can be injected and it can travel through the blood stream without affecting the normal cells. It can travel until it detects cancer cells at a specific site and finds the protein that is released by the cancer cells. The drug can then release its medicinal agents into the tumor to kill the cancer cells and the blood vessels supplying it.
The G2O2 drug has undergone phase I clinical trials, where the safety of a drug is studied. The drug is planned for further levels of clinical trials to study the safety, efficacy and tolerability of the drug in different types of cancers.
