News Archive

A team of researchers from UWA and the University of Birmingham in England is exploring the possibility of redesigning the illicit recreational drug ‘ecstasy’ to help treat blood cancers.

In recent papers, UWA medicinal chemist Associate Professor Matthew Piggott, PhD students Michael Gandy and Katie Lewis, and colleagues show that compounds similar to ecstasy – or MDMA as it’s scientifically known – kill cell-lines derived from blood cancers such as lymphoma, myeloma and leukaemia.

The papers were published recently in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal MedChemComm and Investigational New Drugs .

The MDMA analogues (compounds similar to ecstasy), have been modified to eliminate the psychoactivity seen in ecstasy, as demonstrated by UWA psychopharmacologist Professor Mathew Martin-Iverson and his PhD student Zak Millar. At the same time, their potency against cancer cells has been boosted 100-fold.

In 2005, Professor John Gordon and his team from the University of Birmingham published a paper describing the ability of MDMA to kill lymphoma cells. At about the same time, Associate Professor Piggott and his group were modifying MDMA for Parkinson’s disease drug discovery. The researchers from across the globe teamed up to tackle blood cancers.

Studies to determine how these compounds act, and efforts to discover even more potent drug candidates, is ongoing.