Question: What diseases do you think are possible to cure and how?

Jessica Chu answered on 11 Jun 2011:

Heya,
That is a good question! Sorry but it will be quite a long answer!
New technology will help us improve our understanding of what and how events in our body goes wrong which result in disease. Or technology can help identify external causes so we can look into fixing the causes of disease. This will take time (15, 20, 30 years?) especially if the disease is very complex involving many molecules.
Do you have any specific disease(s) you want me to explain – let me know and I will look it up and try my best to tell you what I have found out about it 
Otherwise I might have to use cancer as an example because that is what my work is about! But I know there are treatments for Alzheimer’s, malaria, diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure and many more!

Temozolomide is a very successful anticancer drug with sales of 1 billion US dollars in 2009. It was developed by Prof. Malcolm Stevens and his team at Aston University, UK. It is for people suffering from advanced forms of gliomas (type of tumor that starts in the brain or spine), melanoma (skin cancer) and brain metastases (cancer from another part of the body that has moved to the brain).
After food, the pH inside the stomach will drop to around pH 2. At pH2, Temozolomide will break down to give a very reactive postively charged compound (methyldiazonium cation). It is so reactive that it will attack electron rich (negatively charged) areas of the DNA such as Guanine (a base pair) . Guanine will have a bulky methyldiazonium cation attached and the cell’s repair molecules will recognise this and try its best to repair it!
The DNA damage caused by Temozolomide will be too great for repair so the cell will not risk replicating the faulty DNA and opt for cell death!

However, even though we have brilliant drugs like Temozolomide, cancer is still such a horrible disease is because firstly, cancer is a group of very complex diseases not just one type of disease. Secondly, cancer cells will develop a resistance to the drug by working in a different way, which makes it extremely hard to cure. For example, it is common to see more effective repair enzymes to fix the bulky Guanin- methyldiazonium cation group in patients who are receiving Temozolomide.

Other successful chemicals found in plants that are used to treat cancer today includes:
Podophyllotoxin, Vinca alkaloids and Camptothecin- they all work in different ways!

Chemicals from trees are used to treat malaria, the tree is called Artemisia annua L.
Galantamine is found in Galanthus woronowii and this is used to treat Alzheimer’s disease
Calanolide A from Calophyllum lanigerum var. austrocoriaceum to treat HIV/AIDS.
Hope this answers your question
Let me know if there’s anything else you want to know!
Jess