All About PARP Inhibitors
Poly ADP ribose polymerase or PARP, is vital in several cellular process; the most important of them being the repairing the DNA and causing cell death. During the hundreds of cell division and replication that our body undergoes, the DNA is broken thousands of times. If this DNA is not joined without any error before replication, it leads to mutations of the gene. Such mutations cause cell death in normal cells. PARP is responsible for the joining of the double stranded DNA and to ensure it does so without mistakes.
There are, however certain cancerous cells that use PARP to repair themselves. By doing so, they enable themselves to an uncontrollable growth. The cancerous cells that use PARP to repair themselves, for example, breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers are usually resistant to traditional treatment. PARP inhibitors are seen to be affective on such cancers
PARP inhibitors are a group of enzyme inhibitors- they restrict the activity of the PARP enzymes in the affected areas. By doing so, the fast growing cancerous cells which are low on oxygen are not able to repair their DNA. This causes cell death in the tumors. It is seen that non-cancerous cells are not affected by PARP inhibitors as they do not replicate themselves at the high rate such as that seen in the cancerous cells. In the absence of side effects on the normal cells and the effect seen on the cancerous tumors, PARP inhibitors are being hailed as one of the most famous anti-cancer drugs.
parp inhibitor are particularly helpful to patients with hereditary breast cancer and triple-negative breast cancer. Apart from being used as an anti-cancer drug, PARP inhibitors are also used as treatment to other life threatening diseases such as strokes, heart attacks and the long term diseases like neurodegenerative diseases.
October 16, 2011
Unprompted review