It seems like some non-cancer drugs have a surprise element of treating cancers.
Occasionally and accidentally, many researchers find that a drug developed for treating one disease can be effective at treating another different condition. For instance, aspirin, a painkiller medication, has been widely used to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease.
Keeping such accidental discoveries in mind, researchers have looked at thousands of drugs to find out whether that could kill cancer cells without actually affecting healthy cells.
A study published in the journal Nature Cancer has found that approximately 50 approved and safe drugs have unrecognized anticancer properties.
Senior study author and Chief Scientific Officer at the Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA, Dr. Todd Golub, said, “We thought we’d be lucky if we found even a single compound with anticancer properties, but we were surprised to find so many.”
First study author and oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Dr. Steven Corsello, said, “We created the repurposing hub to enable researchers to make these kinds of serendipitous discoveries in a more deliberate way.”
The researchers took a fresh look at nearly 4,520 drugs and their efficacy on 578 human cancer cells. They found that 50 such drugs fought the cancer cells, revealing previously unrecognized anti-cancer properties.
Dr. Corsello explained, “Most existing cancer drugs work by blocking proteins, but we’re finding that compounds can act through other mechanisms.”
For instance, some of those 50 drugs did not block proteins in cancer cells but they fought cancer cells by activating other proteins, while some stabilized the interactions between proteins.
The researchers said the drugs, which were found to have unrecognized anti-cancer effects, were among the compounds that treat diabetes, inflammation and control alcohol use disorder.
For instance, Antabuse (disulfiram), a drug that helps treat or control alcohol use disorder, was found to attack cancer cell lines with mutations, which depleted a specific protein.
Considering the study findings, the researchers will be able to determine which drugs could be used to target cancer cells
“The genomic features gave us some initial hypotheses about how the drugs could be acting, which we can then take back to study in the lab,” said Dr. Corsello. Our understanding of how these drugs kill cancer cells gives us a starting point for developing new therapies.”
