A UT Arlington team researching ruthenium compounds as possible anti-cancer drugs has discovered a way to make their complexes more effective against cancer cells and less toxic to healthy cells in lab tests.
Professor Frederick MacDonnell, of the UT Arlington Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, presented his work this month at the 24th International Symposium on Chiral Discrimination in Fort Worth. His presentation was called: "In vitro and in vivo responses to the chirality of ruthenium-based anti-cancer drugs."
Platinum-based drugs are currently the first line of treatment for many cancer patients. Scientists working with similar elements, such as ruthenium, hope to develop effective, less toxic alternative chemotherapy drugs.
The ruthenium-based complexes used in MacDonnell's study are chiral molecules - non-superimposable mirror images known as either "right-handed" or "left-handed" enantiomers depending upon their chemical structure. The researchers used five different chiral ruthenium complexes to try to shrink non-small cell lung cancer samples in the lab. They found that the right-handed configurations were twice as effective as the left-handed configurations. They also saw that the right-handed configurations were twice as well tolerated in terms of acute toxicity as the left-handed configurations.
"What we've found is that the right-handed configuration of this drug is working for you in two fashions, both of them beneficial," MacDonnell said. "It is both more effective at killing cancer cells and is less toxic to the organism -sort of a double-whammy."