Discover anti-cancer utility in drugs used for other diseases

Medical oncology professionals often face the challenge of treating patients with advanced cancer who do not respond to standard treatments and have run out of approved therapeutic options. To overcome this obstacle more quickly, researchers around the world are advancing in the search for the reuse of drugs previously approved for another indication, and the results obtained are already accelerating, today, their application in oncology. The fact that these are already approved drugs implies that their safety is already known, which facilitates their development for a new indication.

A recent study has shown that the combined strategy of analyzing patient biomarkers and computational search for reusable drugs makes it possible to identify therapies applicable to patients who would currently have no treatment.

The study was carried out by a team made up of, among others, Imogen R. Walpole and Malaka Ameratunga, both from the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, as well as Dr. Albert Antolín, a researcher in the Oncobell program at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute. (IDIBELL) in Hospitalet de Llobregat and the ProCure program of the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO).

The results of their research have been obtained through next-generation genomic sequencing of a total of 94 patients, with the aim of analyzing various biomarkers. Of these, the computational approach to drug repurposing predicts that a significant 14% could be treated with therapies already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and currently applied to different diseases.

Although additional studies will be needed to confirm this, the computational drug repurposing approach can help accurately identify new treatments for cancer patients who do not respond to standard therapies, which would accelerate the expansion of approved indications for these medications to benefit a greater number of patients.

Among the many medications approved and already in use, some may have additional uses that are currently unknown. Finding those that can be used against cancer and other difficult-to-treat diseases is a priority. (Photo: Amazings/NCYT)

The study is titled “Computational repurposing of oncology drugs through off-target drug binding interactions from pharmacological databases.” And it has been published in the academic journal Clinical and Translational Medicine. (Source: IDIBELL)