Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Epirubicin
Summary
Epirubicin is an anthracycline drug used for chemotherapy. It can be used in combination with other medications to treat breast cancer in patients who have had surgery to remove the tumor. It is marketed by Pfizer under the trade name Ellence in the US and Pharmorubicin or Epirubicin Ebewe elsewhere.
Similarly to other anthracyclines, epirubicin acts by intercalating DNA strands.
Intercalation results in complex formation which inhibits DNA and RNA synthesis. It also triggers DNA cleavage by topoisomerase II, resulting in mechanisms that lead to cell death. Binding to cell membranes and plasma proteins may be involved in the compound's cytotoxic effects. Epirubicin also generates free radicals that cause cell and DNA damage.
Epirubicin is favoured over doxorubicin, the most popular anthracycline, in some chemotherapy regimens as it appears to cause fewer side-effects. Epirubicin has a different spatial orientation of the hydroxyl group at the 4' carbon of the sugar - it has the opposite chirality - which may account for its faster elimination and reduced toxicity. Epirubicin is primarily used against breast and ovarian cancer, gastric cancer, lung cancer and lymphomas.
The aim of Epirubicin as adjuvanted therapy is to eradicate micro metastasis and prolong disease free survival.
The Standard adjuvant therapy is a combination of cyclophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil (CMF). In comparison to this the Epirubicin therapy contains fluorouracil/epirubicin/cyclophosphamide (FEC). Three large randomized studies have directly compared the epirubicin-containing regimen fluorouracil/epirubicin/cyclophosphamide (FEC) with CMF in the adjuvant setting. Trial one and two contained premenopausal node-positive women with breast cancer, Trial three pre- and postmenopausal women with node-positive or negative breast cancer. It was discovered that FEC is at least as effective as CMF in premenopausal women with node positive- or negative breast cancer and that FEC produced no additional benefit in terms of 5-year relapse-free or overall survival.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.