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Immunotoxin Therapy for Cancer
Lee H. Pai, MD;
Ira Pastan, MD
JAMA. 1993;269(1):78-81.
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| Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings. |
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DESPITE recent advances using conventional approaches (surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy), most human cancers remain incurable. For those patients who have unresectable cancers at the time of diagnosis, the prognosis remains poor. It is clear that new therapeutic approaches are urgently needed.
In the past decade, development of the hybridoma technique by Kohler and Milstein1 and advances in protein chemistry have led to the development of immunotoxins, a new class of cytotoxic agents consisting of a protein toxin coupled to a monoclonal antibody or a growth factor.2-4 These toxins are made by plants or bacteria and act by arresting protein synthesis; cell death rapidly follows. The plant toxins generally inactivate ribosomes by cleaving a specific sequence in the 60S rRNA. The bacterial toxins, Pseudomonas exotoxin A (PE) or diphtheria toxin (DT), ribosylate adenosine diphosphate residues, ribosylate and thereby inactivate elongation factor 2, which is necessary for protein synthesis.
Several
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
Author Affiliations
From the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.
Footnotes
Dr Pastan is a coinventor of a patent on recombinant Pseudomonas exotoxin. The US rights were assigned to the National Institutes of Health, and the residual rights belong to the original inventors.
Reprint requests to National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bldg 37, Room 4E16, Bethesda, MD 20892 (Dr Pai).
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