(B) National Science Centre, New Delhi organised "Cancer Drug Discovery" workshop. Write a
report in 120-150 words on the same to be published in a newspaper.
Answers
Answer:
Doctors and scientists are always looking for better ways to care for people with cancer. To do this, they create and study new drugs. They also look for new ways to use drugs that are already available.
A drug goes from being an idea in the lab to something that a doctor prescribes. To do this, it must go through a long development and approval process. During this process, researchers make sure the drug is safe for people to take and effectively treats cancer. This process often takes many years and significant resources. But the actual amount of time and money needed depends on the drug.
There are 3 main steps in finding and developing a new drug:
Preclinical research, which is when the drug is found and first tested
Clinical research, which is when the drug is tested in people
Post-clinical research, which takes place after the drug is approved
Drug discovery and initial testing
The discovery of new cancer drugs can happen in different ways:
Accidental discovery. In the early 1940s, an explosion exposed sailors to poisonous mustard gas. Doctors found that these sailors had low white blood cell counts. So they began using nitrogen mustard, or mechlorethamine (Mustargen) to treat Hodgkin lymphoma. This is a cancer of the lymphatic system involving the white blood cells. Nitrogen mustard is still a cancer treatment used today. But accidental discoveries such as this are rare.
Testing plants, fungi, and animals. Paclitaxel (Taxol) treats several types of cancer. This was first found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree. More recently, a primitive animal called a sea sponge was used to create the drug eribulin (Halaven). The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has samples of thousands of plants, marine organisms, bacteria, and fungi. These are collected from around the world in the hopes of finding new cancer treatments.
Studying the biology of cancer cells. Most cancer researchers start by comparing both the genes found in DNA and growth patterns of cancer cells to healthy cells. This identifies important steps in the cancer growth process that a drug could fix.
For example, researchers learned that about 20% of all breast cancers have an abnormal amount of a certain protein. It is called HER2 and controls the growth and spread of cancer cells. Five drugs were created to target HER2: trastuzumab (Herceptin), lapatinib (Tykerb), pertuzumab (Perjeta), ado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla), and neratinib (Nerlynx). Now, a person with breast cancer has the tumor tested to check for HER2. It will show if these drugs can treat the cancer
Explanation:
hope it's helpful for you Mark me brainest