Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) is one of the most aggressive and deadly types of cancer, often linked to smoking.
Although it makes up only 15% of all lung cancer cases, it causes around 250,000 deaths each year.
One of the biggest challenges in treating SCLC is that most patients don’t live longer than 10 months after diagnosis, and current treatments have very limited success.
In a promising development, researchers at Purdue University have found that a drug called Supinoxin, also known as RX5902, could help fight SCLC by targeting a key protein involved in how cancer cells grow and survive. Their findings were recently published in the journal iScience.
Supinoxin is not a new drug—it was first created in 2010 and has already shown promise in treating other difficult cancers, like triple-negative breast cancer. Now, Purdue scientists are exploring its use against SCLC.
Supinoxin works by affecting a protein called DDX5, which is part of a group of enzymes known as RNA helicases. These enzymes help process genetic information in cells by unwinding RNA molecules, which is necessary for many cell functions, including cell growth.
Earlier work by the same research team showed that DDX5 plays a major role in the fast and aggressive growth of SCLC cells. When DDX5 is blocked, the cancer cells can’t produce energy properly, and their mitochondria—the part of the cell responsible for energy—start to fail. This leads to a drop in oxidative phosphorylation, a critical energy-producing process in cells.
For a long time, scientists believed that cancer cells mainly used a different process, called glycolysis, to get energy. But more recent studies show that some cancer types, including SCLC, rely on oxidative phosphorylation as well. This means cutting off this energy supply could be a powerful way to slow or stop cancer growth.
In the new study, the Purdue team tested Supinoxin on SCLC cells in the lab and in animal models. They found that the drug significantly reduced cancer cell growth by interfering with DDX5 and lowering oxidative phosphorylation.
While Supinoxin alone was able to keep the tumors small and prevent them from growing, the researchers believe that combining it with another drug could help kill the cancer cells more effectively.
Dr. Elizabeth Tran, a professor of biochemistry at Purdue and lead researcher, began studying the human version of the RNA helicase while researching a similar enzyme in yeast.
Her goal was to understand how these enzymes work in human cells and how they might be connected to cancer. This curiosity eventually led her to focus on SCLC, a cancer with few treatment options and a desperate need for better therapies.
Tran and her team are hopeful that Supinoxin, or other drugs that target RNA helicases like DDX5, could become part of a new class of cancer treatments. These therapies would not only stop tumors from growing but might also offer insight into how RNA-based processes contribute to cancer, opening the door to new drug targets and treatment strategies.
Dr. Bennett Elzey, co-leader of the study, added that further research could help refine their model and explore deeper questions about how RNA and energy production interact in cancer. This approach could eventually lead to better, more personalized treatments for SCLC and other tough-to-treat cancers.
In short, the study highlights a potential new path forward for treating small-cell lung cancer using Supinoxin—a drug that targets the cancer cells’ energy production systems through RNA biology. While more research and clinical trials are needed, the early results offer hope for improving outcomes in a disease where current treatments often fall short.
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The research findings can be found in iScience.
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