It is a grim truth that, on average, one out of every fifty American women will develop ovarian cancer. Even though incremental chemotherapy advances have helped more women to survive ovarian cancer in the past few decades, the majority of those diagnosed with this disease will still die of it. One reason for this is that there is no practical test to diagnose ovarian cancer in its early stages. As with most cancers, chemotherapy and other treatments work much better when the disease is in its early stages. Most cases of ovarian cancer are not diagnosed until the disease has spread beyond the ovaries and into other parts of the body, at which point a woman's chances for survival are very low.

Lately, promising research has been done in the area of so-called "targeted therapy," which has raised hopes that far more effective treatments for ovarian cancer may be available soon.

Most cases of ovarian cancer are not diagnosed until the disease has spread beyond the ovaries and into other parts of the body, at which point a woman's chances for survival are very low.

The basic concept of targeting therapies against infections has been around for more than a century. We take for granted the many effective targeted therapies against bacteria, which appear on pharmacy shelves worldwide under the name antibiotics. Hopefully, someday we will see equally effective, targeted anticancer drugs on those same shelves.

The magic bullet concept originated with a 19th-century scientist who proposed that if a compound could be made that selectively targeted a disease-causing organism, then a toxin for killing that organism could be delivered by linking it to the chemical agent that selects the tissue.(1) The goal was to create a drug that could attack a parasitic or hostile invader without harming the host (i.e., us). The first successful magic bullet was Salvarsan (or arsphenamine), which remained the only cure for syphilis until it was replaced after World War II by penicillin and other antibiotics.(2)