The ideal anti-cancer drug would selectively kill cancer cells within humans while sparing healthy cells, thereby eradicating the cancer and avoiding the brutal side effects that themselves can sometimes lead to cancer.
Targeted treatment is the newest direction of cancer treatment, and some newly published research in the journal Cell points in this direction, but does so in an unexpected way and with unexpected drugs.
A team of researchers from McMaster's Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute used a discovery platform that uncovers the differences between cancerous and healthy human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC), then applied known drugs to cancer stem cells to see which ones were capable of reversing the effect of cancer stem cells.
What they found was that the antipsychotic drug thioridazine is very selective in its ability to target the cancerous stem cells in leukemia without bothering the healthy ones. Thioridazine, as it turns out, antagonizes dopamine receptors expressed on the surface of cancer stem cells in leukemia and breast cancer, suggesting that those dopamine receptors may have value as cancer biomarkers.
Called differentiation therapy, in this process a candidate drug compound like thioridazine can actually take a cancer stem cell and, when the cell begins self-renewal, reverse its malignant intentions and result not in more cancerous cells, but rather in normal, healthy stem cells.
Said one of the researchers, "Now we can test thousands of compounds, eventually defining a candidate drug that has little effect on normal stem cells but kills the cells that start the tumor."
Source: Cell
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