New approach to targeted prodrug therapy

Other targeted prodrug therapies make use of a variety of mechanisms for getting drugs to act on tumour cells, including antibody targeting and gene therapy. But Taylor believes these approaches have disadvantages because they require a knowledge of the biochemistry of the disease. This feature also makes gene and antibody-linked therapies susceptible to resistance by mutation. However, Taylor says his system is not affected in this way. “If the disease mutates, all we have to do is synthesise a new sequence”, he says. Francis believes the concept of targeted prodrug therapies is attractive “because of the obvious advantages of being able to generate large amounts of active cytotoxic agent specifically at tumours sites”. She describes Taylor’s work as “promising” but says there are “potential problems” which include “non-specific activation if target