Irinotecan

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A chemotherapy medication, a topoisomerase inhibitor, given intravenously to treat advanced cancer of the colon and rectum
2. An anticancer drug that blocks an enzyme needed for DNA replication and is used mainly for metastatic colorectal tumors
3. A cytotoxic agent administered by infusion in the treatment of bowel cancer by interfering with tumor cell division

Etymology: Irinotecan is a drug name, and its parts are assembled from pharmacological naming conventions rather than from any ordinary English stem. The name was coined in the 1980s by researchers at the Japanese pharmaceutical company Yakult Honsha, who were developing a derivative of camptothecin, a cytotoxic alkaloid first isolated from the Chinese tree "Camptotheca acuminata" in 1966. The "-irinotecan" ending follows the stem system used by the World Health Organization for anticancer agents, in which "-tecan" marks a camptothecin derivative, and the "irino-" prefix was chosen to distinguish this particular compound from its relatives. The drug was approved in Japan in 1994 and reached wider use in the United States in 1996 under the brand name Camptosar. Because the name is a systematic construction, it has no older meaning to trace; its history lies in the chemistry and in the naming committees that standardized it.

Synonyms: Camptosar