Question: When you tested a drug on cancer cells, what did that drug do?

Lizzard O'Day answered on 13 Jun 2011:

It was dud. It did nada. This was a great lesson learned. The first drug “candidate” I made was designed to interact w/ a particular protein in your body “aspartate transcarbamoylase” (big word for a protein that helps make DNA). Cancer cells need to copy their DNA in order to keep growing, so the idea was, can we make an inhibitor or drug that stops this protein from working. So I made a bunch of molecules that completely shut down the protein when I was studying it in an isolated test-tube situation. I was so excited- I thought “eureka- we have the cure to cancer”. Unfortunately a test-tube is very different than a cell- and a cell is very different than an animal (like a mouse) and a mouse is very different than a human. So something that works in one area may not work in another. When the first “drug” I made didn’t work- I went back to the drawing board- and I made more and more, sometimes we made progress, sometimes we didn’t. It was a great lesson in patience and dedication. Now, we have drugs that can effectively kill cancer cells- however there’s a problem- they also kill healthy cells. Now things like delivery and specifically targeting cancer cells come into play. It’s like trying to crack a code and find cancer’s weakness.