New Anticancer Drug Design: Past and Future Strategies

Abstract

The current strategies we have used for the conquest of the advanced cancer, i.e., one big enough to see, have involved less planned strategy and more the historical accretion of procedures such as surgery (Veronesi, 1973), radiation therapy (Kligerman, 1974), drug therapy (Salmon and Apple, 1976; Sartorelli and Johns, 1974; Carter and Slavik, 1974; Cline and Haskell, 1975), immunotherapy (Fefer, 1974; von Leyden and Blumenthal, 1902), and others (Hahn, 1975). In the innovative clinical thinking, we see attempts to integrate these modalities of therapy (Bloedorn et al.,1961; Cohen et al., 1971; Mathé et al.,1970) and to enhance the effectiveness within each modality—e.g., to develop and utilize radiosensitizers that will make radiation therapy selective for cancer (Dewey and Humphrey, 1965; Erikson and Szybalski, 1963) or radiation protectors that will protect normal cells but not cancer from radiation, or, alternatively, to enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy by the use of drug combinations (Goldin et al.,1968, 1974; Nathanson et al.,1969; E. Henderson and Samaha, 1969).