In a new study from KU Leuven, researchers examined the effect of these antibiotics on patient-derived tumors and found some antibiotics appear to be effective against a form of skin cancer known as melanoma.
The finding suggests a new weapon in the fight against melanoma: antibiotics that target the ‘power plants’ of cancer cells.
These antibiotics exploit a vulnerability that arises in tumor cells when they try to survive cancer therapy.
As cancer evolves, some melanoma cells may escape the treatment and stop proliferating to ‘hide’ from the immune system. These are the cells that have the potential to form a new tumor mass at a later stage.
In order to survive the cancer treatment, however, those inactive cells need to keep their ‘power plants’—the mitochondria—switched on at all times.
As mitochondria derive from bacteria that, over time, started living inside cells, they are very vulnerable to a specific class of antibiotics.
In the study, the researchers implanted patient-derived tumors into mice, which were then treated with antibiotics—either as the only treatment or in combination with existing anti-melanoma therapies.
The antibiotics quickly killed many cancer cells and could thus be used to buy the precious time needed for immunotherapy to kick in.
In tumors that were no longer responding to targeted therapies, the antibiotics extended the lifespan of—and in some cases even cured—the mice.
The researchers worked with antibiotics that are now, because of rising antibiotic resistance, only rarely used in bacterial infection. However, this resistance has no effect on the efficacy of the treatment in this study.
The team showed the cancer cells show high sensitivity to these antibiotics, and they now look to repurpose them to treat cancer instead of bacterial infections.
If you care about skin cancer, please read studies about widely used high blood pressure drug linked to skin cancer in older people and findings of two prebiotics may help treat colon cancer, skin cancer.
For more information about skin cancer and your health, please see recent studies about common arthritis drug linked to higher skin cancer risk and results showing that some skin cancer may start from hair.
The study is published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. One author of the study is Eleonora Leucci.
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