Cheap Anti-Parasitic Pill May Help Fight Treatment-Resistant Lung Cancer

When cancer cells become resistant to drugs and continue to grow, treatment becomes more difficult. Researchers have now found that combining an inexpensive anti-parasitic drug with a cancer drug may help fight some of these resistant cells.

When cancer cells become resistant to drugs and continue to grow, the disease becomes more difficult to treat. Now researchers have found that perhaps combining an inexpensive antiparasitic drug with a cancer drug can help fight some of these resistant cells.

According to the selection report and quoted by ScienceAlert, researchers combined the antiparasitic drug mebendazole with the cancer drug gefitinib in laboratory experiments. This compound reduced the survival of treatment-resistant cancer cells. In the experiment on mice, the tumors grew later with the simultaneous use of these two drugs.

The study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, focused on a type of non-small cell lung cancer that had become resistant to gefitinib treatment.

Why is the combination of these two drugs effective?

Gefitinib targets a protein called EGFR, which is involved in the growth and proliferation of cells. However, cancer cells sometimes find a way to continue growing despite taking this drug.

Mebendazole, used to treat parasitic infections, affects internal cell structures that are essential for cell division.

The researchers hypothesized that simultaneous targeting of growth signals and internal cell function could make it more difficult for resistant cancer cells to continue proliferating.

Reduction of viable cancer cells in the laboratory

After 72 hours, about 93% of cells were still alive in cells that had received only gefitinib. This rate reached about 80% with the use of mebendazole alone, but it decreased to about 38% with the combination of both drugs.

The use of mebendazole alone and with a five times higher concentration also increased the cell viability to about 30%.

The tests also showed damage to the cells' DNA; A finding that can be related to the disruption in the process of cell proliferation.

Tumors grew more slowly in mice

The researchers then tested the compound on mice with tumors made from human lung cancer cells that were resistant to treatment.

The results showed that the median time to double the size of tumors in untreated mice was 6.2 days. This time reached 10.3 days with mebendazole alone and 15.5 days with gefitinib alone.

But in mice that received both drugs, the tumors doubled in size after 25 days.

However, the tumors were not completely destroyed and it is not yet known if this method is effective in the human body.

Can this method be used to treat cancer?

Researchers still don't know if mebendazole actually removes the cancer cells' resistance to gefitinib, or if it reduces the cells' ability to survive by causing more damage.

Also, the amount of absorption of mebendazole in the body is variable, and it should be determined how much of the drug reaches the tumor and whether the simultaneous use of these two drugs is safe or not.

In the next steps, the researchers plan to test this compound on other cancer models and tumors prepared from patient samples.

Taken together, these findings suggest that combining an antiparasitic drug with a cancer-targeted drug may help inhibit the growth of some treatment-resistant tumors; But to determine its effectiveness and safety in humans, more research is needed.

This compound is not yet an approved treatment for lung cancer, and patients should not use mebendazole to treat cancer without consulting a doctor.