Jocelyn KaiserCan the red devil be defanged? Doxorubicin, an old chemotherapy drug that carries this unusual moniker because of its distinctive hue and fearsome toxicity, remains a key treatment for many cancer patients.
But a new study reports the drug can be tweaked to reduce its most punishing side effect, cardiac damage, without blunting its ability to curb tumors.The work, from an academic team in the Netherlands, upends conventional thinking about doxorubicin and related drugs, suggesting they do not need to directly damage DNA to kill cancer cells.