IIT Guwahati scientists develop strategy to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs specifically to cancer cells
India Today
The developed approach would allow the development of drug carriers for chemotherapy with enhanced efficacy and negligible side effects.
The Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Guwahati researchers have developed a new strategy to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs specifically to the cancerous cells in a patient's body. The path-breaking results of this research have been published in prestigious journals of The Royal Society of Chemistry, including 'Chemical Communications' and 'Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry'.
The research papers have been co-authored by Professor Debasis Manna, Department of Chemistry, IIT Guwahati, along with his research scholars Subhasis Dey, Anjali Patel, and Biswa Mohan Prusty, among others.
Anticancer activities were carried out in collaboration with Professor Siddhartha Sankar Ghosh and Plaboni Sen from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and Professor Arindam Bhattacharyya and Soumya Chatterjee from Calcutta University.
A part of the ongoing research was recently highlighted on the cover page of Chemical Communications.
The problem with existing chemotherapeutic drugs is that they kill healthy cells of the body in addition to cancerous cells, leading to numerous undesirable side effects. In fact, it is believed that cancer deaths are as much due to the side effects of chemotherapy as the disease itself.
There is worldwide research to overcome the drawbacks of secondary toxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs. Some strategies that are being explored include target-specific delivery of the drugs and on-demand delivery of appropriate drug doses to cancerous cells/tissues.
To meet the above needs, the molecule developed by the research team has four special features.
