Designing cancer drugs

By Andy Extance2021-07-19T09:13:00

A digital illustration of a drug bound to a DNA strand

Source: © STORM Therapeutics

How screening is used to develop targeted therapies that improve the lives of cancer patients

Chemists are hunting down a killer responsible for the death of someone in the UK every four minutes. That killer is cancer and many chemists are inventing new drugs to treat it. This article explains the drawbacks of current cancer treatments and the ways scientists discover new drugs. The new treatments are designed to either work better than older drugs, or fight cancers that we don’t already have good treatments for. Read the article, share it with your 16–18 students and use the accompanying resource to explore the role of cisplatin as an anticancer drug and the properties of transition metal complexes.

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