There’s a big push by some in the cancer
research community to look at old drugs to see if they’ve got some anti-cancer
activities. It makes a huge amount of sense to do this as it short circuits all
of the phase I trials to test a drug’s toxicity, often these drugs are cheap
generics and there’s many years of data on pharmacokinetics and side effects
and so on. It means that in a best case scenario you can cut out years of
preliminary work. Some of the drugs, like the anti-diabetic drug Metformin or
plain old Aspirin also have evidence of anti-cancer effects in the population
rather than just from test-tube experiments or computer simulations. And the
good news is that the list of such drugs is growing longer by the day, and the
evidence continues to mount up that some of the best candidates will enter use
soon either as support to existing treatments or, in some cases, as part of new
protocols to prevent recurrence of disease after treatment.
One of the more surprising drugs in
Mebendazole, an old drug that has been around for a long time as a treatment
for parasites like tape-worms. Mebendazole, which is available over the counter
in any case, has got a surprising amount of evidence in its favour as an
anti-tumour drug. This evidence comes from modelling the molecular profile of
the drug to see how it fits with particular cancer pathways, from experiments
in test tubes and in animal testing using human tumours. As pre-clinical
evidence goes, that’s pretty much the works.
