• Question: Could we every treat cancer in a form of an intravenous drug?

    Asked by jonathanjoyce96 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Probably, yes. Intravenous injection is just a route of delivery – we can put pretty much anything into it – and I mean everything! The usual chemotherapy drugs, of course, but also other types of drugs (like the kind I’m working on which boosts the immune response), viruses that kill cancer cells, bacteria to fire up the immune system, or your own cells that have been activated and grown up in the lab – or better yet, tiny nanorobots that can swim through your blood and go straight to the tumour to deliver any and all of the above! So, whatever type of cancer it is, we could probably beat it with one of these things pumped into a syringe 😉

    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Many of the more recently developed anti-cancer drugs are proteins (notably monoclonal antibodies), which your stomach and gut would make short work of. So they have to be injected.
      Getting though the digestive tract is a major hurdle in drug design and many chemicals are just too unstable to survive the acid bath of the stomach.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 26 Jun 2013:

      Hi jojnathanjoyce96- yes, because this would mean that it would be able to get to work without having to deal with any nasty stomach acids etc. which might make it less effective if patients had to swallow it

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