Existing drugs could also combat kids' cancer
Last Updated: Thursday, August 19, 2010 | 3:50 PM ET
CBC News
Children with neuroblastoma may be able to use existing medications to fight their cancer under a new approach to drug screening proposed by Canadian researchers.
Researchers have found a way to test existing medications that are already approved for other diseases to try to help children with neuroblastoma — the most common solid tumour that occurs outside the brain in the nervous system of children under five.
There is an urgent need to find better, less toxic treatments for the cancer, particularly for children whose growing bodies are particularly vulnerable to side-effects.
Scientists often repurpose medications for other purposes, but in this week's online issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, senior investigator Dr. David Kaplan, a senior scientist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, and his colleagues describe how they took patients' own cancer stem cells for the drug screening tests.
The researchers identified two candidate drugs: DECA-14, an antibiotic found in some mouthwashes, and rapamycin, a drug that is used to prevent organ rejection in children who have had transplants.
Both drugs treated neuroblastoma in mice and were non-toxic to normal stem cells from children, the study's authors found.
In neuroblastoma, the challenge is to find drugs that target the tumour's growth, spread and relapse.
Investigators have started a Phase 1 clinical trial at CHU Sainte-Justine in Montreal and two U.S. centres to evaluate rapamycin in combination with the chemotherapy drug vinblastine, for pediatric solid tumours.
The research was funded by the Stem Cell Network in partnership with the James Fund for Neuroblastoma Research, and Solving Kids' Cancer.
The study was also supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute, Lilah's Fund, Shania's Sunflower of Hope, Sam's Day, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the Terry Fox Research Institute, and the McLaughlin Centre and SickKids Foundation.
