Shock therapy for cancer
No, it's not a miracle cure for cancer, but French researchers working for the National Scientific Research Center (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) in Paris believe they are on the way to cracking a major obstacle to successful cancer chemotherapy: how to use a high enough dose of drug to kill the cancer but spare the patient. Getting the drug right inside the tumor cells could be one way round the problem. But as Lluis Mir of the CNRS team found, some of the best anticancer drugs, like bleomycin, can't get past the membranes surrounding the cells of certain cancers. ''You only need a few hundred molecules of bleomycin inside the cell to destroy it but the cell membrane can be a formidable barrier'', says Mir.
