Professor Bruce Cain

Bruce was passionately interested in making advances that would be of direct benefit to cancer patients and became very widely read in all aspects of anticancer drug development and clinical trial. His own research was based on the concept that drugs designed to interact selectively with DNA might provide useful anticancer drugs, and he was one of the first scientists to use molecular modelling, achieved with a plastic model of DNA more than a metre high and an array of molecular building blocks to construct potential binding drugs. His early studies focused on drugs that bound to an outer narrow helical groove of the model, but he later turned his attention to drugs that intercalated between adjacent base pairs of the DNA double helix. His work was rewarded by the development of a drug, later called amsacrine, which showed high activity against an experimental leukaemia in mice. He made frequent visits to the U.S. National Cancer Institute to support the advancement of amsacrine to trial, and after much frustration succeeded in convincing the NCI to initiate a Phase I clinical trial. This led to a positive result, and subsequent Phase II and Phase III studies, including a key Phase III trial carried out in the Haematology Department at Auckland Hospital, established amsacrine's significance as a treatment of acute leukaemia. Amsacrine subsequently became widely used internationally for second-line treatment of adult acute leukaemia and Bruce also became recognised internationally as a pioneer in the use of medicinal chemistry to develop new anticancer drugs.