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Overview Signal transduction Signal transduction and cancer Signal transduction inhibitors (STIs) Multi-signal transduction regulators (STRs) Phenoxodiol		MSTRs offer the promise of therapies that can reach the very heart of the cancer process and correct it, and do so with little or no effect on healthy, non-cancer cells. The technology stems from recent advances in understanding the underlying mechanisms that allow cancer cells to persist in the body and to multiply. Breakthroughs in the fields of genomics and molecular biology have now revealed that cancer cells become established because they are able to override some key decision-making processes within the cell. This decision-making concerns such fundamental matters as whether to survive or to die, and whether to multiply or not. By overriding the survival/death decision-making process, cancer cells live forever. By overriding the growth/non-growth decision-making process, cancer cells grow in an unregulated manner. Up until now, the focus of anti-cancer drug development has been on dealing with the consequences of this process - that is, trying to block the cancer cell's ability to multiply or to survive. The idea of drugs that might restore the normal decision-making processes has not been thought possible. The technology platform in MEI now offers that possibility. In the late 1990s, Novogen scientists discovered a group of plant chemicals that are involved in regulating the same primitive decision-making processes such as survival/death and growth/non-growth in plant cells. These chemicals are known as isoflavonoids - these are plants signal transduction regulators. This family of plant chemicals was found to have the ability to regulate the same fundamental decision-making processes in human cells, and more importantly, were able to restore the normal decision-making processes in human cancer cells. Exposing human cancer cells to this family of drugs, results in the previously suppressed decision-making processes being restored. The result is that the cancer cell immediately stops multiplying and then dies. An important side benefit is that these drugs have no effect on the decision-making processes within normal cells - if the cell is already behaving normally, then it is not affected by these drugs. Novogen scientists have chemically modified these naturally-occurring plant isoflavonoids and made them more active and more suitable for human cells. The result is a large family of synthetic drugs that work at different parts of the cancer cell's decision- making processes. The first of these drugs, Phenoxodiol, currently is undergoing clinical studies as a new anti-cancer drug for a wide range of human cancers. Other drugs with different modes of action have been identified and are progressing through pre-clinical studies in their lead up to clinical studies.

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