Chemotherapy Drugs 101: Anti-metabolites
Chemotherapy.
The word instills terror, invokes images of hair loss, weakness, sickness. It can be an extraordinarily trying time, for patients and their caregivers. The literally hundreds of different drugs used in chemotherapy treatment can be daunting. In order to try and remove some of the terror and mystery of chemo, I'm going to use this blog to take an occasional look at the various groups of drugs used in chemo—their names, what they are, and what they do—to cancer cells and to our bodies.
In this entry I'll be looking at a couple of the so-called anti-metabolites. These chemotherapy drugs work by pretending to be some of the necessary building blocks of DNA. During the so-called S phase of the cell cycle, they prevent certain actual DNA building blocks from being included. The result is that the cell can't make DNA, it can't grow, and it eventually dies. They are regarded as being very effective, and are therefore used widely in chemotherapy treatment.
The following are some of the primary anti-metabolites used in lymphomas such as Hodgkin's Lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Click on the drug to be taken to the American Cancer Society's patient page for that drug, which contains general information as well as potential side effects.
Purine analogues:
Mecaptopurine (marketed as 6-MP and Purinethol).
Thioguanine (marketed as 6-TG, 6-Thioguanine and Tabloid).
Fludarabine (marketed as Fludara and 2-fluoro-ara-AMP).
Pyrimidine analogues:
Cytarabine (marketed as Ara-C and Cytosar-U). Also known as cytosine arabinoside, this drug has been used to treat Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
Antifolates:
Methotrexate (marketed as Folex, Mexate, MTX, Methotrex—formerly Amethopterin). This drug has been used to treat Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It is a folic acid analogue that indirectly inhibits DNA and RNA production by impairing the function of folic acid.
Note: The World Health Organization's Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System (ATC) classifies anti-metabolites as L01B.
More Articles
More Articles
Amazon.com is pleased to have the Lymphoma Information Network in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship items...
The question ought to be what are myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), since this is a group of similar blood and bone marrow diseases that...
Merkel Cell Carcinoma (MCC) is a very rare and aggressive skin cancer that usually develops when a person is in his or her 70s. It is...
At some point, the Seattle biotech company Cell Therapeutics Inc (CTI) should earn an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for utter and...
Site Beginnings
This site was started as Lymphoma Resource Page(s) in 1994. The site was designed to collect lymphoma...
Three papers appearing in the journal Blood and pointing towards a regulator-suppressor pill could offer hope to blood cancer...
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a third so-called Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the investigational oral...
The US Food and Drug Administration today has approved an expanded use of Imbruvica (ibrutinib) in patients with...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it has granted "Breakthrough Therapy Designation" for the investigational agent...
According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of California, San...
Pharmacyclics has announced that the company has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for...
New research suggests that frontline radioimmunotherapy...
Gilead Sciences has announced results of the company's Phase II study of its investigational compound idelalisib, an oral inhibitor of...
