Side Effects of Suicide Gene Therapy

The efficacy of standard chemotherapy tends to be limited by an inability to achieve sufficiently high drug concentrations to tumor cells without inducing concomitant toxicity elsewhere. If the tumor itself were induced to produce the drug, the efficacy would be increased. This strategy can be achieved by installing in tumor cells a gene that can activate a harmless prodrug into a cytotoxic drug. The premise is that activation of prodrugs in or near the tumor would lead locally to a high concentration of the toxic drug.