Researcher :	Dr. Ng Chew Hee
Designation :	Associate Professor
Faculty:	Faculty of Engineering and Science
Department:	Department of Science and Chemistry
Email Address:	ngch@utar.edu.my

Cisplatin, a metal-based anticancer drug, is a well known compound. Like other anticancer drugs, its problem is cell resistance, non-discrimination (attack both cancer and non-cancer cells) and serious toxic side-effects. Doctors are always faced with this perpetual dilemma: "Take this medication or that medication?" and "Effective but how much bad side-effects".

So, one requirement for a successful drug discovery programme is no or minimum toxic side-effects. Research into proteasome inhibition by metal-based compounds is a new area of research and there are only very few published reports of such endeavour. Most of this type of research comes from Ping Dou's group (Florida, USA). So far, the tested copper complexes revealed that they can induce apoptosis and inhibit proteasome activity in some cancer cell lines but not in the corresponding normal cell lines. Apparently, the normal cells are unharmed but the corresponding cancer cells are killed by these compounds. This approach seems promising. In fact, bortezomid (an organic compound which does not contain metal) has been approved for clinical use against myeloma (a type of cancer). No metal-based compound has as yet undergone clinical trial as this is a new area of research. So, this is can be considered a frontier-type of research.

In UTAR, our research group focuses on copper, zinc and cobalt complexes, and screen them for their ability to induce apoptosis and proteasome inhibition in normal and cancer cell lines. This research is a joint collaboration between UTAR and Institute of Medical Research (IMR). The IMR collaborators include Dr Alan Khoo and Dr Munirah. Preliminary results on some copper complexes, tested on a certain type of cancer, show that they induce apoptosis at micromolar concentration, able to inhibit proteasome, increased the level of ubiquitinated proteins and kill many more cancer cells than the corresponding normal cells.

FL has been extensively applied in engineering and science fields; especially in the application of FL in breast cancer diagnosis (Kovalerchuk, Triantaphyllou, Ruiz, and Clayton, 1997). In business arena, the typical business valuation has a significant limitation: the failure to recognise uncertainty; fortunately, 'fuzzy math' functions in spreadsheets can formally incorporate significant additional information into valuation reports and help mitigate the limitations of the traditional valuation approach (McKee, 2004). Thus, FL could be an effective tool to solve many elusiveness problems in CGR.