IF IT happened in a factory, it would be condemned as industrial sabotage. But in the battle against cancer, a molecule that wreaks havoc on the protein assembly line is just what is needed. Now a drug that does this is showing early promise, extending one skin cancer patient’s life by four years after other treatments had failed.
The drug, known as 17AAG, renders several key signalling proteins useless. Because cancer cells are actively growing and dividing all the time, the ability to manufacture these proteins is much more important than for normal cells.
The drug, which is made by…
