The discovery of cancer drug cisplatin

Its origin had nothing to do with cancer or drug. 

Biophysicist Barnett Rosenberg conceived the idea that electric currents may affect cell growth. 


He designed an experiment that passed an electric current through a soup of chemical nutrients in which bacteria grew. 


For electrodes he decided to use platinum, thinking that the inert metal would minimize spurious chemical effects. 


After two hours of electric current, the bacteria in the soup stopped dividing, instead, some continued to grow to enormous sizes. 
To pinpoint the cause of this phenomenon, he did numerous experiments, going into blind alleys and new directions. 


It turned out that his original ideas about electric current and platinum were both wrong. 
The current had no effect on bacteria growth and division.  The platinum electrodes, under the experimental conditions, produced a trace amount of a rare compound cis-diammonia platinum chloride.  It was this compound that prevented the bacteria from dividing. 


In his paper on this result, Rosenberg suggested that similar metal ions might also inhibit division of other bacteria or cells.  If so, they could be useful in cancer therapy by stopping cancerous cell division. 


This time his conjecture turned out to be right.  Research along this line led to cisplatin (marketed as Neoplatin), a treatment for a certain type of testicular cancer in men and ovarian cancer in women. 


J. Mann.  The Elusive Magic Bullet: The Search for the Perfect Drug.  New York: Oxford University Press (1999),  pp. 149-151. 

Posted in: Cis-Platin