Science / Brief : Cancer Drug’s Effect Found

In a finding that could lead to a major advance in the fight against cancer, an Idaho scientist may have discovered why the common anti-cancer drug Adriamycin can cause heart failure and death at doses that are intense enough to dissolve tumors.

Dr. Richard Olson at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boise found that when patients receive injections of Adriamycin, their bodies change the drug into another substance, which he calls Adriamycinol. That substance is up to 1,000 time more toxic to the heart than Adriamycin, he said. And with each dose of Adriamycin, the level of Adriamycinol builds up in the patients’ hearts.

“People have been looking for 20 years for the answer to why it causes heart failure,” Olson said. His findings will appear in a spring issue of “Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences.” In his experiments, Olson placed the heart tissue of rabbits into test tubes, adding Adriamycin to determine the drug’s effect on the heart muscle.