Professor Alan Bennett wanted to understand why certain combinations of anti-cancer drugs produced a greater effect than the use of the same drugs on their own.
By 1987 there were several different anti-cancer drugs available and, with some of them, a greater effect was achieved by giving a combination of two or more drugs at the same time.
Professor Alan Bennett from Kings College London, discovered that two particular drugs Methotrexate and Indomethecin, when used together were more effective at killing cancer cells when tested in the laboratory. Before this combination could be tried out on patients, Professor Bennett needed to know why this happened. The research project funded by AICR revealed that Indomethecin made human breast cancer cells take up more of the Methotrexate drug. He also found that this effect extended to a number of other anti-cancer drugs. This research helped stimulate the testing of new combinations of anti-cancer drugs, such as the cyclophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil combination that is now used to treat breast cancer.
