Reducing the toxicity of the anticancer drug cisplatin

What is it about?

Cisplatin hydrolysis products (CHP's) bind to plasma proteins. Since the human serum albumin (HSA) concentration of cancer patients is decreased compared to healthy controls, we employed a Metallomics method to investigate if the concentration of free CHP's in blood plasma of cancer patients can be decreased by boosting the HSA concentration of plasma before cisplatin is added in vitro.

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Why is it important?

The concentration of free CHP's in blood plasma were decreased at the 2 h time point if exogenous HSA was added before cisplatin. These results demonstrate that it should be possible to decrease the toxic side effects of cisplatin by the administration of HSA. The fact that considerable concentrations of CHP's were detectable at the 2 h time point, however, indicates that their binding to HSA is sluggish, which may not be sufficient to entirely mitigate the toxic side effects of cisplatin in vivo.