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Drug & Radiation Resistance Program
Circumventing drug and radiation resistance
Professor Ross Davey, Ms Rozelle Harvie, Ms Sheridan Henness, Dr Mary Davey (UTS)

Over 50% of all cancer is cured by surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The rest will either be inherently resistant or it will have developed resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs during treatment. This resistance is broad and involves a diverse array of drugs. The name multidrug resistance is often used to describe this drug resistance.

Our philosophy is that new treatments aimed at circumventing multidrug resistance are more likely to come from a better understanding at the molecular level of how chemotherapy works and how cancer cells protect themselves against the effects of chemotherapy.

Drug resistant cancer cells have more ABC transport proteins which pump the drug molecules out of the cell as fast as they enter. This prevents drug from accumulating to a toxic level in the cell.