There are up to 10,000 fungal spores in every cubic meter of air that can enter our bodies when we breathe them in. Some of these belong to the species Aspergillus fumigatus, a widespread fungus found everywhere in the environment.
Biochemistry
Feb 28, 2023
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228
Many chemotherapeutic agents used to treat cancers are associated with side-effects of varying severity, because they are toxic to normal cells as well as malignant tumors. This has motivated the search for effective alternatives ...
Bio & Medicine
Dec 15, 2020
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291
There is a broad range of mechanisms associated with chemoresistance, many of which to date are only poorly understood. The so-called cellular stress response—a set of genetic programs that enable the cells to survive under ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 10, 2020
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141
A team of researchers from New York University has engineered nanoscale protein micelles capable of both delivering chemotherapeutic drugs and of being tracked by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Bio & Medicine
Mar 20, 2019
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31
DNA damage occurs in all cellular organisms. In human cells, it can be caused by the body's normal metabolic activities, by environmental factors or by chemotherapy. During the crucial phase when cells replicate their genetic ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 11, 2019
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6
The DNA replication process in which cells divide to create new cells also triggers repair of DNA damage, researchers from the University of Copenhagen report in a new study. The researchers studied extracts from frog eggs, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jan 23, 2019
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28
Nanosystems that deliver anticancer drugs or imaging materials to tumours are showing significant progress, particularly those that respond to tumour-related stimuli, according to a review published in the journal Science ...
Bio & Medicine
Oct 30, 2018
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26
Clinicians today have an arsenal of more than 200 drugs at their disposal for treating a range of cancers—68 drugs were approved between 2011 and 2016 alone. But many chemotherapeutic agents pose stubborn challenges: they ...
Materials Science
Aug 9, 2017
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28
A research team led by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) has solved the three-dimensional structure of a key protein that helps damaged cellular DNA repair itself. Investigators say that knowing ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 25, 2016
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44
The Genomic Instability Group led by researcher Óscar Fernández-Capetillo at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), has for the first time obtained a panoramic photo of the proteins that take part in human ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 25, 2013
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2
Chemotherapy, in its most general sense, refers to treatment of disease by chemicals that kill cells, both good and bad, but specifically those of micro-organisms or cancerous tumours. In popular usage, it refers to antineoplastic drugs used to treat cancer or the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. In its non-oncological use, the term may also refer to antibiotics (antibacterial chemotherapy). In that sense, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent was Paul Ehrlich's arsphenamine, an arsenic compound discovered in 1909 and used to treat syphilis. This was later followed by sulfonamides discovered by Domagk and penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming.
Most commonly, chemotherapy acts by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of cancer cells. This means that it also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles; this results in the most common side effects of chemotherapy—myelosuppression (decreased production of blood cells), mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract) and alopecia (hair loss).
Other uses of cytostatic chemotherapy agents (including the ones mentioned below) are the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and the suppression of transplant rejections (see immunosuppression and DMARDs). Newer anticancer drugs act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this is termed targeted therapy.
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