Warrington Rc
May 1, 1986
Citations
0
Influential Citations
8
Citations
Journal
Anticancer Research
Abstract
Abstract One of the major limitations to the chemical management of human malignancies is the failure of most antineoplastic agents to act specifically against tumour cells. A novel approach for improving both the specificity and the efficacy of experimental cancer chemotherapy is described in this review. The approach is based upon the use of L-histidinol in combination with conventional anticancer drugs. L-Histidinol, a structural analogue of the essential amino acid L-histidine, is a reversible inhibitor of protein biosynthesis which evokes disparate responses from non-tumorigenic and tumorigenic cells in culture. Whereas L-histidinol protects a wide variety of phenotypically normal cells from anticancer drug toxicity, it enhances the vulnerability of tumorigenic cells to the same agents. More importantly, these remarkable properties of L-histidinol are retained in tumour-bearing animals. Thus, L-histidinol diminishes the myelocytoxicity otherwise associated with the in vivo use of agents such as cytosine arabinoside and 5-fluorouracil. Simultaneously, L-histidinol increases the inherent capacities of these two antimetabolites to eradicate in situ tumour cells. More recently, it has been found that L-histidinol can increase both the specificity and the efficacy of a number of other antineoplastic agents. For example, alkylating agents such as BCNU, cyclophosphamide and cis-platinum, as well as the antitumour antibiotic daunomycin, can be combined with L-histidinol to provide curative treatment for tumour-bearing animals under conditions where these drugs, on their own, have little or no impact on survival. These results demonstrate that the L-histidinol/anticancer drug combination approach to chemotherapy is effective with a variety of clinically-relevant antineoplastic agents. However, it remains to be demonstrated whether this approach will prove applicable in, or effective for, human cancer chemotherapy.