The ASX biotechs putting their heart into cancer care

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ASX healthcare stocks Racura Oncology and Nyrada are working to develop cardio-protection drugs from anthracycline chemotherapeutics. ... Read More The post The ASX biotechs…

Racura and Nyrada are working to protect the heart from chemotherapy damage. Pic: Getty Images

It’s the ultimate catch-22 for doctors, with effective treatments often having a trade-off between benefit and harm.

Immunotherapy has the power to unleash the body’s immune system to attack and kill cancer, but can also damage healthy organs.

Corticosteroids can be used to suppress chronic inflammation in a variety of conditions that don’t have a cure, including autoimmune illnesses, but are associated with certain toxicities.

Antibiotics save lives by fighting bacterial infections but their use can have side effects at an individual level, while their overuse and misuse contribute to the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) at a societal level.

The list goes on, and while doctors take a pledge to “First, do no harm”, the clinical realities are often in contradiction to their oath.

Then there is anthracycline chemotherapy, one of the most powerful and widely used weapons in modern medicine’s arsenal against cancer.

For decades, anthracycline chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin have been used globally in frontline treatment protocols for a range of cancers including breast, leukaemia, lymphoma and sarcoma.

Yet, while this class of drugs remains a cornerstone of oncology, doctors must weigh its potentially life-saving efficacy against well-documented risks to long-term heart health.

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