So for my Honours year (starting in a month or so!) I'll be working on the cancer drug cisplatin (yay! Cancer treatment research!). Essentially this is a small platinum compound that binds to DNA, preventing its replication, thus inhibiting profileration of tumour cells. It has been employed quite successfully since the late 70's, after its anti-tumour properties were accidentally discovered (as all good scientific discoveries are) in a lab involving E. coli (oh E. coli, you sure do get around). Specifically it's one of the most commonly used drugs to treat testicular and ovarian cancer, and to a lesser extent, lung cancer and other cancers.
I'm not 100% sure where I'll be with the lab work, since my supervisors (Dr Anne Galea and A/Prof Vincent Murray; Prof Murray would have more on this on his university website if you care to look) have been working on this topic for years now so I'll jump along wherever they're up to in February. From what I understand it has to do with identifying the regions on the human genome where cisplatin binds to DNA. It's quite well established that cisplatin preferentially targets G-rich sequences (of ACGT fame), so the lab group intends to map out all such sequences in the genome via next-generation sequencing. These would be cloned into vectors and treated with cisplatin to measure the level of binding.
Additionally, quite a bit of work is being done on cisplatin analogues due to its toxic side-effects (nephrotoxicity, neurotoxicity, gastrointestinal toxicity, hematologic toxicity...). So similar compounds are being tested for their clinical activity in the hopes that they'll somehow be less toxic without sacrificing effectiveness. Mostly similar cis-structured platinum compounds with other branches to improve DNA-binding, etc. are being studied, and some appear to be moderately successful. It seems replacing the platinum core for a similar material like nickel, iridium or ruthenium doesn't work out the way researchers have hoped, though a group at USYD is still working on that, I think.
I've wanted to work on cancer treatment research for quite some years now (in high school I debated either this or marine biology), so I'm really excited that the opportunity is actually right in front of me. If all goes well, my plan is to do a PhD in the field and we'll see how it goes from there I suppose.
I wrote this instead of actually working on my literature review.
