High-Throughput Testing Yields Candidate Drugs for Chemotherapy

Researchers have used rapid high-throughput testing technology to identify candidate drugs that are active only in the presence of certain cancer-causing genes and proteins and are not toxic to normal cells. A report on their work was published in the March 24, 2003, issue of Cancer Cells.

The investigators, from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (Cambridge, MA, USA), were searching for chemical compounds that would kill cancer cells without harming normal tissues. Employing a novel screening technique, they were able to survey more than 23,000 compounds. From this group they identified nine compounds that met these specifications. One compound, named erastin by the researchers, was previously unknown and seems to kill cancer cells through a different mechanism than many conventional cancer drugs.

High-throughput testing is an emerging technology in drug discovery. "The old method to find drug candidates was to take tumor cells from a human tumor, and find things that killed them, without really understanding how they would ultimately affect other cells in the body,” explained senior author Dr. Brent Stockwell, a researcher at the Whitehead Institute. "Drug candidates identified by this method often turned out to be completely toxic to healthy cells and thus, not usable as a therapy.”



Related Links:
The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research