Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
Chemotherapy, in the cancer-treatment sense, isn't very selective. Fortunately, cancer cells divide so much faster than regular cells, this imparts a measure of selectivity. All chemotherapeutic agents are poisons of one sort or another, but we continue to get better. Mechlorethamine is just an "alkylating agent," which means it will react promiscuously, forming covalent adducts with any nucleophilic species it encounters. Oftentimes, this means DNA, which means cell division will be impaired (for all cells). If this sounds a bit like carpet-bombing a knife fight, you begin to see the problem with cancer therapeutics. The nitrogen mustards (as in mustard gas - they're actually the same molecules) don't see much use today. The cisplatins work by a similar mechanism (they also see more contemporary use - you never read an article about them without hearing how Lance Armstrong took them as part of his chemo regimen).
Comments
Yes, I've known for quite some time that chemotheraputic drugs were poisonous. That's why I'm so happy that new drugs and processes are being developed that selectively target cancer cells alone.
Posted by: Tony P | January 5, 2007 8:22 PM
Hi MotD,
it would be great if I could interest you in adding InChI's or SMILES to these daily doses of chemistry, especially it that would include some semantics so that [1] could pick it up. These semantics make it possible to have computers see that the blog item is about molecules, which is more difficult with images.
If you are interested in that, please let me know, so that I can explain how easy it is (just wrap the InChI/SMILES in or , see [1].
If not, no problem either. I would still be interested in hearing what way you would like to go with respect with machine parsing of your blog.
1.http://wiki.cubic.uni-koeln.de/cb/inchis.php
Posted by: Egon | January 6, 2007 3:36 AM
Egon- Actually, check the alt tags on my images - I have been using inchi for some time. Thanks though!
Posted by: MoTD | January 6, 2007 9:35 AM