Soon, magic shotgun to cure cancer Washington: A new approach to
drug design promises to help identify future drugs to fight
cancer and other diseases that will be more effective and have
fewer side effects. Rather than seeking to find magic bullets,
chemicals that specifically attack one gene or protein involved
in one particular part of a disease process, the new approach
looks to find “magic shotguns” by sifting through the known
universe of chemicals to find the few special molecules that
broadly disrupt the whole diseases process. “We’ve always been
looking for magic bullets,” Kevan Shokat, PhD, a Howard Hughes
Medical Institute Investigator and chair of the Department of
Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, said. “This is a
magic shotgun — it doesn’t inhibit one target but a set of
targets — and that gives us a much, much better ability to stop
the cancer without causing as many side effects,” he said. The
magic shotgun approach has already yielded two potential drugs,
called AD80 and AD81, whic