A BREAKTHROUGH treatment that prompts cancer cells to kill themselves is set to revolutionise treatment and could be available within five years.

The medical breakthrough by scientists at the University of NSW came from research into the devastating and deadly childhood cancer neuroblastoma.

However it has also been proven to destroy melanoma cancer cells and is expected to be effective in treating most cancers.

The journal Cancer Research reports today that the compound TR100 targets the protein tropomyosin, which is one of the building blocks of cancer cells. "It is much like what happens when you see a building collapse on the TV news," researcher Professor Peter Gunning, from UNSW Medicine said.

"Our drug causes the structure of the cancer cell to collapse - and it happens relatively quickly."

Other chemotherapies destroy the genes in cancer cells or prevent the cancer cells dividing in two or are directed at signals outside the cancer cell.

"The therapy we have developed takes apart the structure of the cell, we're trying to cause the cell to commit suicide," Professor Gunning said.

Previous attempts to attack the structure of cancer cells have failed because the cell building blocks hit by the cancer drugs were the same building blocks used to keep the heart beating.

"It was a good idea, you just had to get around the problem of killing the patient as well as their cancer," Professor Gunning said. Five candidate drugs made from the compound are currently being tested on animals in the United States to determine whether they cause any toxicity.

It will be used in conjunction with other chemotherapies.

Researchers hope to test the drug on a dozen Australian children with high-risk neuroblastoma in 2015 but need $1 million to get the trial under way.

"Inevitably it will have side effects, but we've solved the problem of the heart," Professor Gunning said.

The research to date has been funded by the Kids' Cancer Project and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Zoe Emin was diagnosed with an aggressive neuroblastoma cancer in her stomach when she was 14 months old.

She has just completed gruelling chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that have pushed her cancer into remission.

Neuroblastoma has a survival rate of just 40 per cent for high-risk patients and Zoe's mother Alison describes the prospect of a new treatment as "unbelievable".

"Neuroblastoma has a high relapse rate and to have a new treatment available in two years is fantastic," Alison said.

The local community around the Emin family's farm in York, in Western Australia's wheatbelt, has raised $130,000 towards the research into the new cancer drug.

Kids' Cancer Project chief executive Peter Neilson paid credit to the tenacity of the researchers.

"This research opens up a door on something the pharmaceutical industry and the majority of science gave up on 25 years ago," he says.