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Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2008;300(13):1507.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Like a battery that loses power over time, some medications become ineffective after prolonged use. Of course, the drugs themselves do not change; rather, some change in the status quo, such as the emergence of resistance in a pathogen or a cancer cell, subverts the drug's effects.

Now a study by researchers at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif, demonstrates a particularly promising new strategy for retaining drugs' efficacy in the face of such disease-related resistance (Thorne SH et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008;105[34]:12128-12133).

The work involves altering the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel in a way that allows the medication to sidestep the membrane pumps that drug-resistant ovarian cancer cells produce to expel drugs. "We kind of cloak the drug and run it through the membrane, where it can act within the cell," said principal investigator Paul Wender, PhD, a professor of chemistry at . . . [Full Text of this Article]

STEALTH STRATEGY



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