How are new drugs developed?

Article Outline

• Copyright

There has been a proliferation of promising new drugs introduced recently for the treatment of childhood cancers. Clinicians usually hear about these drugs first when clinical trials are reported. The steps leading up to identification of an agent as a potential antineoplastic drug rarely appear in the clinical literature.

For this reason, we thought that the readers of The Journal would enjoy the report of Bridges et al in the current issue. The study describes the use of an innovative technique for screening agents for their potential effectiveness against various cancers. The method has been used by the National Cancer Institute for high through-put screening of potential drugs. The investigators specifically addressed the Ewing’s sarcoma family of tumors (ESFT). Cell lines established from these cancers were grown in hollow fiber tubes, which were then implanted in mice. In this case, a known agent, doxorubicin, was given to the animals and the decline in cell numbers within the hollow fibers was measured.

This study is really more of a description of a technique than a report of the discovery of a new drug. Clinicians, however, will be fascinated to learn about this technology, and study of this report will give them a greater appreciation of a major early step in the development of new drugs.