Prof Angshuman Sarkar
PANAJI
A novel mode of action of an already established drug used for the treatment of malaria named ‘Quinacrine’ for the treatment of human breast cancer has been investigated by Prof Angshuman Sarkar, associate professor at the department of Biological Sciences at BITS Pilani, Goa who worked on this research along with his team.
Earlier this team had proved the repurposing of this drug in treating human lung cancer too. Now they have shown that specific cytotoxicity of this drug works on human breast cancer cells too. Excluding this repurposing drug typical mode of action, they have also shown an internal modification through other cellular events on accelerated cell death in human breast cancer.
Their work has been published recently in a well-known International Journal ‘Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy’ which publishes papers on clinical and basic medicine and pharmacology. This research work was financially supported by Goa Cancer Society and Department of Biotechnology, government of India.
Invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), sometimes called infiltrating ductal carcinoma, is the most common type of breast cancer. About 80 % of all breast cancers are invasive ductal carcinomas. Invasive means that the cancer has ‘invaded’ or spread to the surrounding breast tissues. Ductal means that the cancer began in the milk ducts, which are the ‘pipes’ that carry milk from the milk-producing lobules to the nipple.
Carcinoma refers to any cancer that begins in the skin or other tissues that cover internal organs ” such as breast tissue. All together ‘invasive ductal carcinoma’ refers to cancer that has broken through the wall of the milk duct and begun to invade the tissues of the breast.
Over time, invasive ductal carcinoma can spread to the lymph nodes and possibly to other areas of the body. IDC is the most recurrent, counting to 80 % of all breast cancers worldwide.
Initializing from the milk duct, it eventually invades the other tissue of the breast outside the duct, which takes one to two months. This rapid growth or division demands an anti-cancer agent that can act as a 'shotgun,' having numerous modes of action and accelerated death for cancer cells.
