CHAMPAIGN, Ill., March 25 (UPI) -- A U.S.-led team of scientists says it has developed an anti-cancer agent that's about 200 times more effective than similar drugs used in recent studies.
University of Illinois researchers said the new agent belongs to a class of drugs called bisphosphonates -- compounds originally developed to treat osteoporosis and other bone diseases.
Previous studies found the bisphosphonate drug zoledronate, significantly reduced the recurrence of breast cancer in pre-menopausal women with estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer. Similar results were reported previously for hormone-refractory prostate cancer.
The scientists, however, said zoledronate quickly binds to bone, reducing its efficacy in other tissues.
"We're trying to develop bisphosphonates that will be very active but won't bind to the bone, because if they bind to the bone they're not going to go to breast, lung or other tissues," said University of Illinois Professor Eric Oldfield, who led the new study.
The team subsequently developed a new compound, BPH-715, that proved especially potent in cell culture and effectively inhibited tumor cell growth and invasiveness. BPH-715 was 200 times more effective than zoledronate, the research indicated.
The researchers -- Andrew Wang of Academia Sinica in Taipei, Illinois chemists Rong Cao and Yonghui Zhang, Tadahiko Kubo of Japan's Hiroshima University and Socrates Papapoulos of Leiden University in the Netherlands -- report their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
