The illicit drug ecstasy has been redesigned by researchers at the University of WA for use in treatment of blood cancers.
Medicinal chemist Associate Prof Matthew Piggott and PhD students Michael Gandy and Katie Lewis from UWA showed compounds similar to ecstasy, or MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine), kill cell lines derived from blood cancers such as lymphoma, myeloma and leukaemia. They say MDMA analogues were modified to eliminate the psycho-activity seen in ecstasy, as demonstrated by UWA psycho-pharmacologist, Prof Mathew Martin-Iverson, and his PhD student, Zak Millar. At the same time, the potency of the substance against cancer cells was boosted 100-fold, they said.
In 2005, Prof John Gordon and his team at the University of Birmingham published a paper describing the ability of MDMA to kill lymphoma cells. Associate Prof Piggott and his group were modifying MDMA around that time to explore treatments for Parkinson's disease. Both teams are now working on blood cancer therapy with the compound.
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