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Animations: How Our Drugs Work
Can I see the effects of ZYBRESTAT in animal studies? 
Voice Script from Video:
This movie was supplied by the Tumour Microcirculation and
Advanced Technology Development Groups at the Gray Cancer
Institute, Mount Vernon Hospital, Northwood, UK. (http://www.gci.ac.uk)
With special thanks to Gill Tozer, Boris Vojnovic and Ian Wilson.
Combretastatin A4-P as a tumor vascular targeting agent.
This is a tumor viewed
under the microscope. A large blood vessel can be seen running across the
surface of the tumor. This vessel is draining the waste products from the tumor
tissue.
At high magnification, you can see the individual red blood cells
flowing through the vessels. Generally, the blood flow is moving very fast,
efficiently supplying the tumor with the oxygen and nutrients it needs for
growth. However, some of the tumor tissue lies quite far away from the blood
vessel, and if you look carefully you'll see that some vessels are flowing quite
slowly and the red cells are spaced far apart. This suggests that even before
giving a drug, there are some tumor regions that are nutrient deprived and
hypoxic. These regions are a problem for many conventional cancer treatments. But
in the future, it may be possible to specifically target them. In a moment,
you'll see the effects of Combretastatin on these flowing vessels. The drug
disrupts one of the proteins, which makes up the skeleton of living cells. The
dividing cells, which line the inside of tumor blood vessels, appear to be
particularly sensitive to this drug. One of our main aims is to find out why
this should be so.
Here's the effects of Combretastatin now. This is the same
tumor region 10 minutes after giving Combretastatin. As you can see, the effects
are dramatic. The rates of blood flowing through the vessels has decreased
enormously and the vessels are a lot narrower. And now it's one hour, fifty
minutes after drug administration. Many of the vessels have disappeared from
view completely. This may be because other vessels upstream have become blocked
so that blood is no longer flowing. Some of the vessels clearly contain stagnant
blood. It's effects such as these that make Combretastatin a promising vascular
targeting agent.
And now we're having a look at different regions within the
tumor after treatment with Combretastatin. This is the edge of the tumor, where
blood is still flowing, albeit very slowly.
Here's the vessel we saw at the
beginning, and there's very little flow here… or here.
Here's the low power
view again after treatment |
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