A medication used to treat diabetic nerve pain might make chemotherapy more effective for lung cancer patients, according to new research from the University of Missouri School of Medicine, published in Clinical Cancer Research.
Despite surgery and chemotherapy, over half of non-metastatic, non-small cell lung cancer patients experience a return of cancer, mainly due to drug-resistant cancer cells.
Researchers have found a way to make these stubborn cells more sensitive to chemotherapy, said study author Dr. Jussuf Kaifi.
“Traditional lung cancer treatments, including chemotherapy, often fail because of drug resistance,” Kaifi said.
“This is a major cause of death in patients, so finding ways to overcome drug resistance is crucial for improving patient outcomes.”
The study looked at 10 non-small cell lung cancer tumors, with half being drug-resistant. These resistant tumors had high levels of a specific enzyme called AKR1B10.
When treated with a diabetic neuropathy drug called epalrestat, the tumors became less resistant to chemotherapy, increasing their sensitivity to the treatment.
Epalrestat is available in several countries and is well-tolerated by patients, but it is not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States.
The medication is currently undergoing high-level clinical trials as part of the FDA’s approval process. If approved, epalrestat could quickly be used as an anti-cancer drug for lung cancer patients.
“Developing new cancer drugs is usually a long, expensive, and inefficient process,” Kaifi said. “In contrast, ‘repurposing’ existing drugs for new uses is much faster and cheaper.
Epalrestat can be rapidly advanced to the clinic to improve cure rates in lung cancer patients.”
Dr. Jussuf Kaifi is a thoracic surgeon at MU Health Care and an assistant professor of surgery at the MU School of Medicine. He specializes in general and minimally invasive thoracic surgery, including treating malignant and benign lung conditions. He earned his medical degree and doctorate from the University of Hamburg in Germany.
The research team from MU also included scientists Kanve Suvilesh, Ph.D., and Yariswamy Manjunath, Ph.D.; Ph.D. students Yulia I. Nussbaum and Mohamed Gadelkarim; bioinformatician Raju Murugesan, Ph.D., from the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics; Chi-Ren Shyu, Ph.D., Director of the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics; Akhil Srivastava, Ph.D., assistant professor of cancer biology; Satyanarayana Rachagani, DVM, Ph.D., associate professor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery; and Wesley C. Warren, Ph.D., professor of genomics. Feng Gao, Matthew A. Ciorba, Jonathan B. Mitchem, and Guangfu Li also contributed to the study.
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