Indian-born Jackmil Jogy recently studied the effectiveness of a new selenium compound for treating triple-negative breast cancer.
Dr Jogy said the triple-negative form was "one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer".
About 15% of breast cancers were triple-negative, and they also lacked a "targeted treatment" by drugs.
The New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation estimates about 3300 women and 25 men are diagnosed with breast cancer in this country every year, and there are more than 600 deaths.
Her recent research showed that one selenium compound, diphenyl diselenide (DPDS), was a "promising" anti-cancer drug and should be progressed into pre-clinical trials, she said.
Dr Jogy, who recently shifted to Melbourne, said DPDS could provide targeted therapy with few or no side effects.
It could take about five years for the compound to enter clinical trials, if preliminary results were still "looking good", she said.
Comments
Congratulations to the research team!
To ODT: The danger of covering such highly technical matters in news papers is that it is highly likely to be misinterpreted by the common (lay)people. By going through this report, a common person (may be a cancer patient!) would raise hope that an "anti-cancer drug" is near to become available to him/her in the town. But it is NOT!!
In the industry, a "drug" means a chemical(or biological) compound that has been tested (and confirmed) for its safety and effectiveness in human, and approved for use in patients for specific therapeutic indication(s). So the truth is that the researchers have nicely 'screened' one of the 'drug candidates' targeting a particular variant of breast cancer. In a standard pharmaceutical company, thousands of 'drug candidates' are 'screened' for a particular disease, but hardly one (or even none) of them gets lucky to become a "drug", after years of research investing more than 2.5 billion dollars. So, I highly doubt if merely an academic scientific research work is 'news' worthy for the public; especially where a REPORT potentially becomes RUMOUR (?). We have scientific journals for the purpose; so don't worry!!