A team of researchers has created a powerful new cancer drug called LiPyDau that shows impressive results in early lab studies.
This drug, developed through a collaboration between the Medical University of Vienna, the HUN-REN Research Center for Natural Sciences, and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, may be a big step forward in treating cancers that don’t respond well to current treatments.
Chemotherapy has long been used to fight cancer, but it often comes with serious side effects and doesn’t always work—especially when cancer cells become resistant to the drugs.
The team, led by Dr. Gergely Szakács at the Center for Cancer Research at MedUni Vienna, has been trying to solve this problem by designing new drugs that are more powerful and better targeted.
They started with a well-known chemotherapy drug called daunorubicin, which belongs to a group of drugs called anthracyclines.
These drugs are very effective, but they can be toxic, causing harm to healthy cells and leading to unpleasant or dangerous side effects. The researchers created a new, even stronger version of daunorubicin—but it was too toxic to be used safely on its own.
To fix this, they placed the new drug inside tiny fat-like bubbles called liposomes. This approach, which has been used in other cancer drugs, helps deliver the drug directly to tumors while protecting healthy parts of the body. The result is a new treatment named LiPyDau.
In tests on mice with different kinds of cancer, LiPyDau worked incredibly well. In one test using a melanoma model, a single dose nearly stopped tumor growth.
In lung cancer models, even those with tumors that didn’t respond to common treatments, the drug still worked. In aggressive breast cancer models, the tumors shrank significantly, and in some hereditary cases, they disappeared completely.
One of the most exciting findings was that LiPyDau could also kill cancer cells that had become resistant to many other drugs. It does this by using a special method: the drug permanently ties together the two strands of DNA inside cancer cells. This causes damage that the cancer cells cannot fix, and they eventually die.
Daunorubicin and other anthracyclines have been used in cancer treatment for many years and are included on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines.
But their use is often limited by side effects and the fact that tumors can become resistant over time. Liposomal packaging has been one way to try to solve this problem, and LiPyDau is the latest example of how this can work.
Dr. Szakács explained that the results in mice show that putting this powerful drug into liposomes makes it safe to use. The next step will be to carry out more studies to see if these amazing results can also happen in humans.
If they can, LiPyDau could become an important new tool in the fight against cancer—especially for people whose tumors don’t respond to current treatments.
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The study is published in Molecular Cancer.
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