Gallium Chemotherapy Drugs

Paper Summary:

This paper describes gallium-based chemotherapeutic drugs. Included is a brief discussion of the history and development of these drugs, clinical uses for gallium, and problems with gallium chemotherapy. Also included is a discussion of potential alternate uses for gallium drugs, including using gallium as an antiviral or to combat hypercalcemia.

From the Paper:

"Gallium is a naturally occurring group IIIa heavy metal. Because of its low melting temperature (303 K), chemists have long used gallium industrially as a component of low-melting alloys. It has only been within the last forty years, however, that scientists have studied gallium in medicine. Following the serendipitous discovery of platinum's antitumor properties in the late 1960s, the U.S. National Cancer Institute started a systematic study of several metallic elements to see if they too might display anticancer effects. While all of the Group IIIa elements (boron, aluminum, gallium, and thallium) displayed significant cytotoxic activity, gallium was the most active and least toxic of these metals when tested against animal tumors.1 Later, in a separate development, researchers noted gallium's ability to localize in bone, leading clinicians to use 67Ga citrate in some diagnostic bone scans. In the 1970s, a physician conducting such a scan observed quite accidentally that gallium accumulated in nonosseous malignant tissue as well.2 Indeed, further tests showed that gallium was the only IIIa metal to display cytotoxic activity when inoculated at a site other than the tumor itself.1 These unique properties spurred a great deal of research interest in developing gallium-based chemotherapeutic agents."

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