# Doxifluridine

Source: https://onco.cc/drugs/doxifluridine/  
OnCo record `doxifluridine` (Treatment). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Doxifluridine is an oral fluorouracil prodrug approved in Japan in 1987 and used in China and Korea for stomach, bowel and breast cancers; capecitabine, which the body turns into doxifluridine, later carried the same idea to the rest of the world.

## Summary

Doxifluridine was developed by Roche and approved in Japan in 1987 for gastric, colorectal, breast, cervical and bladder cancers, taken as daily capsules. Because it depends on thymidine phosphorylase for activation, it achieves higher fluorouracil concentrations in tumours than in normal gut, though diarrhoea remains its main toxicity. Capecitabine adds two further enzymatic steps so that doxifluridine is generated inside the body, and it displaced doxifluridine in Western development. Doxifluridine remains in use in Japan, China and South Korea, mostly in adjuvant gastric cancer regimens.

## Fields

- Kind: Treatment
- Status: established
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Also known as: 5'-Deoxy-5-fluorouridine; 5'-DFUR
- Tags: gap-fill; chembl-universe
- Brand: Furtulon
- Modality: Oral fluoropyrimidine prodrug
- Mechanism: Converted to fluorouracil by thymidine phosphorylase, an enzyme more abundant in many tumours than in normal tissue; it is the final intermediate in capecitabine's activation.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxifluridine
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxifluridine
- ChEMBL CHEMBL1200953: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/explore/compound/CHEMBL1200953

## Connected records

- cancers: [Colorectal cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/colorectal/), [Gastric & gastro-oesophageal junction cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/gastric/), [HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/breast-hr-positive/)
- technologies: [Cytotoxic chemotherapy](https://onco.cc/technologies/cytotoxic-chemotherapy/)
- targets: [Thymidylate synthase (TYMS)](https://onco.cc/targets/tyms/)
- drugs: [Capecitabine](https://onco.cc/drugs/capecitabine/), [Fluorouracil (5-FU)](https://onco.cc/drugs/fluorouracil/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/doxifluridine.json