Question

For a chemotherapeutic drug to be useful for treating cancer cells, which of the following is most desirable?
A) It is safe enough to limit all apoptosis
B) It does not alter metabolically active cells
C) It only attacks cells that are density dependent
D) It interferes with cells entering G0
E) It interferes with rapidly dividing cells

Answer 1

E) is the most likely answer for a desired drug that attempts to treat cancer.

Since conventional therapeutic drugs that deals with cancer are almost always harmful to both cancer cells and normal cells, there is no silver bullet treatment yet that can effectively only target cancer cells.

But what is known is that cancer cells are very metabolically active and their rate of division are often elevated compared to normal cells. So drugs have been made in an attempt to limit the growth of cancerous cells by interfering with their fast rate of metabolism and cellular division. So anything that can limit fast division and metabolism can be considered useful to combat cancer. As you can imagine, if the cancerous cells are affected, so will the normal cells.

Answer 2

thank you

Answer 3

You're welcome :)

Answer 4

actually, this is what was thought to be a good therapy about 30 years ago. but with that, you get a LOT of problems that accompany chemotherapy.

tumor cells usually do divide quickly, so chemo does attack these cells. BUT: bone marrow cells, immune cells and other stem tissue also consists of rapidly dividing cells. PLUS: many tumor cells have got ABC-carrier, which just throw out any chemotherapy you throw at them.

modern chemotherapy aims for specific characteristics of tumor cells. you want a distribution of the pharmacon between tumor cells and other body cells of at least 1000:1. THAT's the real goal of chemotherapy today: killing ONLY cancer cells. but since school biology doesn't teach the interesting stuff, E) is probably right. ;-)