And oncologists didn't even know!
Scientists have discovered the anti-cancer effect of many conventional drugs
Scientists have tested thousands of non-oncological drugs in the laboratory and found out that several dozen of them are capable of killing cancer cells. The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Cancer (Corsello et al., Discovering the anticancer potential of non-oncology drugs by systematic viability profiling – VM).
According to a study conducted by American scientists from the Broad Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, some medications for diabetes, inflammation, alcoholism and even for lowering cholesterol and treating arthritis can kill cancer cells in the laboratory.
After analyzing several thousand already developed medicinal compounds, the authors found almost 50 non-oncological drugs with anticancer activity.
"We thought we would be lucky if we found at least one compound with anti–cancer properties, but we were surprised to find such a number," one of the authors of the study, Todd Golub, an employee of the Broad and Dana-Farber Institutes, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard, is quoted in a press release from the Broad Institute. medical school.
For the first time, researchers conducted a screening of the entire Broad's Drug Repurposing Hub online database of dual-use drugs, which contains more than six thousand existing drugs and compounds.
Historically, scientists have faced new opportunities to use some existing drugs. An example is aspirin, which has proven effective in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. "We created this database to allow researchers to make such random discoveries in a more conscious way," says the first author of the study, Steven Corsello, an oncologist at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, founder of the Broad's Drug Repurposing Hub portal.
The researchers tested all database connections on 578 human cancer cell lines from the Broad Institute's Encyclopedia of Cancer Cell Lines (CCLE), measuring the survival of these cells.
Some of the discovered drugs suppressed cancer cells not in the way that most anti–cancer drugs do – by blocking proteins – but used previously unknown mechanisms - for example, activation of another binding protein or acted by stabilizing protein-protein interactions.
The cellular approach used to measure the survival of cancer cells allowed scientists not only to conduct all the studies relatively quickly, but also made it possible to study the response to drugs of each cell line individually, taking into account their genomic features, such as mutations and methylation levels.
According to the authors, in the future, this will allow using the discovered patterns as biomarkers to identify patients who are most likely to benefit from certain medications.
For example, scientists have found that disulfiram used in the treatment of alcoholism kills cell lines carrying mutations that cause depletion of metallothionein family proteins, and drugs containing vanadium compounds originally developed for the treatment of diabetes destroy cancer cells expressing the SLC26A2 sulfate transporter.
"Genomic features have given us some initial hypotheses about how these drugs might work," Corsello said. "Understanding how these drugs kill cancer cells is the starting point for developing new treatments."
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