‘Mystery drug that could help cancer patients’

A new drug designed to kill cancer cells is on the verge of being approved for clinical trials.
A team led by Dr. Yehuda Golan, a professor of medicine at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, says it has created a molecule that kills cancer cells by blocking a key enzyme in the cell’s machinery.
The drug, called N-acetylcysteine (NAC), was approved by the FDA on Friday for use in patients with aggressive tumors that do not respond to standard chemotherapy treatments.
It is the first time a new cancer drug has been approved for use against tumors that respond to existing drugs.”NAC was designed to target cancer cells that have been programmed to resist the treatment with standard cancer drugs,” Golan told The Jerusalem Times on Friday.
“So it’s like putting a button on the patient’s head.
We can tell him or her if it is safe to go on treatment with the chemotherapy, and the chemo does not work.”NAC is a compound found in a plant that is used to make synthetic fibers.
Golan said the molecule is the equivalent of a button in a patient’s chest that can be activated by a small amount of pressure.
Golan said he did not expect the new drug to be a game changer.
“What I think is most interesting is that it will be possible to treat a lot of patients with very low risk,” he said.
“I think it’s possible to give a therapy to people that have cancer that is completely different from the one they have.
This will be the first indication that it can be a useful treatment for cancer.”
Golan added that he hoped the drug would also be able to be used to treat other cancers, such as leukemia, melanoma, and liver tumors.
“For leukemia, there are so many different types of cancer that we are not sure whether this will be a treatment that will work for them,” he told The Times.
“It will work in those cancers that have not been seen before.”
Golan said the drug will likely be used in patients who have already had successful chemo treatments and who do not require additional treatment.
He said that patients with advanced cancers, who have been undergoing chemotherapy, may be able use NAC to be able treat them.
“This will be for a large number of people who have advanced cancers,” he added.
“If the treatment works, and they are able to control their disease, then I think it will not be a problem.
I think that they will be able control their cancer better and more easily.”
The drug’s safety is not yet fully established, but Golan emphasized that it is currently being tested on healthy volunteers.
The FDA approved NAC in October, and will begin approval in November.
The agency has scheduled a public meeting to discuss the drug’s clinical trials and other aspects of the drug.
The NAC compound was first identified by Israeli scientists in a paper published in the journal Cancer Research in 2015.
The new research, which was funded by the Israeli Science Foundation, involved using the compound to treat patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a type of cancer not usually associated with the immune system.
“We were interested in the development of this compound to target the tumor cell in the lung,” Golas said.NAC, which is a non-toxic molecule, targets two genes involved in the tumor-fighting machinery.
The scientists also discovered that it was able to kill a tumor cell that had already responded to chemotherapy.
“When the drug was given to the lung, we observed that there was no damage to the cancer cells.
They were totally destroyed,” Gola said.
He added that the research team has now found that the drug is effective in blocking an enzyme in cells called cytochrome P450 (CYP)3A4.
This enzyme is the main enzyme that converts the chemical precursors of COX-2, a compound responsible for many cancers, into a compound that the body can use to break down the cancerous cells.
“In a previous study, we showed that this enzyme is involved in a large proportion of cancers,” Gansky said.
“We wanted to understand what this enzyme does.
We started looking for mutations in this enzyme, and we found one that was very common, which means that we knew that it could be important.”
Gansky said the researchers are now testing NAC on a group of patients who already have aggressive tumors and have not responded to the standard chemotherapy.
The patients will be given the drug daily.
The researchers said the treatment is similar to that used to control breast cancer.
“It’s the same way as chemotherapy, except that we have a lot more of these tumors, so the patients have to go through chemotherapy twice,” Gankan said.
Gansky also said that the cancer drug could also be used as a potential treatment for other types of cancers, including leukemia and brain tumors.
“This could be used against all types of diseases,