What's Already in the Medicine Cabinet Could Be the Next Cancer Treatments – Brinkwire

It costs $ 475,000 per patient to treat childhood leukemia with advanced Kymriah therapy. But what would happen if an anti-cancer drug could be obtained daily because it already existed?

This is exactly what happened when French doctors used an antihypertensive drug on a child with a benign tumor. The drug, called propranolol, lowered blood pressure, but also reduced the tumor. In subsequent studies, a diet comprising propranolol was also an effective treatment for patients with angiosarcoma, a rare cancer of the blood vessels with a low survival rate.

This success drew the attention of Pan Pantziarka, an oncologist with the Anticancer Fund, who subsequently requested – and received in December 2016 – orphan drug status in the European Union (which means that the company has seven years to develop it into treatment).

At a time when the discovery of drugs on the market, and that Big Pharma is developing fewer drugs, a growing number of researchers are, like Pantziarka, betting on old drugs. Cancer drugs, until then unknown but powerful, can hide in compounds thrown away by pharmaceutical companies or may already exist in generic drugs designed for other uses. According to the Anticancer Fund, recycling can reduce about four years the typical development time of an oncology drug. "Reconverted drugs could bring benefits to patients much faster than developing a drug from scratch," says Steven Corsello oncologist of the Broad Institute of Cambridge, Mbadachusetts

Corsello is part of a collaboration that developed a repository of about 5,000 compounds, called the Drug Repurposing Hub, which went into service last year. A monitored compound is a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration that costs less than $ 50 a month and has shown unexpected activity against cancer. These collaborations are part of a broader trend: the global market for drug reorientation will grow from nearly $ 24.4 billion in 2015 to nearly $ 31.3 billion by 2020, according to BBC Research.

The reconversion is not recent but accelerated years. And that's because researchers, who used to rely on serendipity, now have tremendous data-processing technologies that help identify cross-match candidates. The drug Sildenafil, for example, was first tested for use in angina pectoris. After the participants reported unexpected side effects, but not always undesirable, they were noticed as Viagra. Seven years later, Pfizer nicknamed Revatio, a therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension.

While reuse shortens the time required to market an oncology drug, the amount of money it saves is not clear. One study cited development from zero to over $ 2 billion, versus $ 300 million for repositioning. Andreas Persidis, general manager of Biovista, who uses data calculation techniques to find new uses for old drugs, thinks that these claims are "exaggerated".

Perhaps, but for pharmaceutical companies, reuse has become routine, and often very profitable. A drug derived from thalidomide, marketed as an anti-nausea pill for pregnant women in the 1960s, was scrapped when it caused birth defects. Like the cancer drug Revlimid, it's a billion dollars a year for Celgene Corp.

The disadvantages of Big Pharma are the lack of patent protection for generic drugs. Their low prices and immediate availability are a benefit to patients, but difficult to turn into profits for pharmaceutical companies. For this reason, pharmaceutical companies are not particularly interested in funding generic recycled trials. "The best way for the industry is to develop new therapies that address unmet medical needs," says David Epstein, former head of the Novartis Drug Unit and currently a partner of the venture capital fund. Flagship Pioneering. From time to time, he adds, "developing an older drug for a new use may make sense, but it should be the minority of drug development."

Conversion is not about excluding drugs. 39, pharmaceutical industry. And given the heterogeneity of cancers, why not do everything possible to discover others, potentially less expensive? "We simply want to maximize the number of treatments that exist," says Corsello.