Cancer is a disease caused when cells divide uncontrollably and spread into surrounding tissues.
Cancer cells can break away from the original tumor and travel through the blood or lymph system to distant locations in the body, where they exit the vessels to form additional tumors. This is called metastasis.
In a study from the Broad Institute of MIT and elsewhere, scientists found that drugs for diabetes, inflammation, alcoholism, and for treating arthritis in dogs, can also kill cancer cells.
They analyzed thousands of already-developed drug compounds and found nearly 50 that have previously unrecognized anticancer effects.
The findings suggest a possible way to accelerate the development of new cancer drugs or repurpose existing drugs to treat cancer.
Historically, scientists have stumbled upon new uses for a few existing medicines, such as the discovery of aspirin’s heart benefits.
In the study, the team used Broad’s Drug Repurposing Hub, a collection that currently comprises more than 6,000 existing drugs and compounds that are either FDA-approved or have been proven safe in clinical trials (at the time of the study, the Hub contained 4,518 drugs).
They tested all the compounds in the Drug Repurposing Hub on 578 human cancer cell lines from the Broad’s Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE).
They found nearly 50 non-cancer drugs, including those initially developed to lower cholesterol or reduce inflammation, that killed some cancer cells while leaving others alone.
Some of the four-dozen drugs appear to act not by inhibiting a protein but by activating a protein or stabilizing a protein-protein interaction.
Most of the non-oncology drugs that killed cancer cells in the study did so by interacting with a previously unrecognized molecular target.
The researchers were also able to predict whether certain drugs could kill each cell line by looking at the cell line’s genomic features.
This suggests that these features could one day be used as biomarkers to identify patients who will most likely benefit from certain drugs.
The team hopes to study the repurposing library compounds in more cancer cell lines and to grow the hub to include even more compounds that have been tested in humans.
If you care about cancer, please read studies about the cause of common pancreatic cancer, and artificial sweeteners are linked to higher cancer risk.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about how drinking milk affects the risks of heart disease and cancer, and results showing vitamin D supplements strongly reduces cancer death.
The study was conducted by Todd Golub et al and published in Nature Cancer.
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