Associate Professor Katrine Qvortrup and Postdoc Katja Grier, Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark, are developing a new drug that can find cancer cells inside the body and kill the cells from the inside. The research group has designed a linker, cleaved only when meeting sulfatase. High sulfatase concentrations are usually seen in hormone-dependent cancers such as prostate cancer and certain types of breast cancer. It was done in close collaboration with Finsen Laboratory from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen.
This enables the drugs to more precisely target the cancer cells resulting in greater efficacy and fewer side-effects, because healthy cells are not targeted. Read more about this great research in the article: "Trojan horses released into bloodstream to kill cancer cells"