Double whammy. Researchers have turned a pill against heartburn that could be used to treat lung cancer and an anti-epileptic pills that could treat Crohn's disease.
Marina Sirota
What if a cheap sold on the counter medication proved to be a cure against cancer or another deadly disease? Scientists have developed a new way to predict such unexpected benefits of existing drugs, and they confirmed two potential new therapies just to prove the point. "This promises new uses for drugs that have already been tested for their safety and provides a faster and cheaper way for new drugs," said Atul Butte, an expert in bioinformatics at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who conducted the study
There are many examples of drugs originally developed to treat a disease that has proven to help another. acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) is not only a pain killer, but is also used to reduce the risk of heart attack. And when a blood pressure drug called sildenafil was found to have an unexpected side effect, it has become erectile dysfunction blockbuster now known as Viagra . These crosses can save drug developers a lot of time and money. to develop one new drug takes on average more than a decade and cost about $ 800 million. existing drugs have experienced safety profiles and are approved for human use, so they can be quickly evaluated for new indications.
"But most reformatting of drugs is still due to casual observations or guesses," said Butte. In today's issue of Science Translational Medicine , it and colleagues present a more efficient way to find new uses for old drugs. gathering data on how diseases and drugs affect gene activity about 30,000 in a human cell researchers collected information on genes that are activated or silenced in certain diseases and certain medications for many years. "Our hypothesis was, if a disease is characterized by certain changes in gene expression and if a drug causes inverse changes, then that the drug may have a therapeutic effect on the disease, "he said.
To find such opposite pairs, Butte and his colleagues used public databases and compared the data with 100 diseases for 164 drug molecules. They found 53 candidate therapeutic agents for diseases. Many games have already been discovered and turned into therapies, but others were completely unexpected. For example, the analysis predicted that the epilepsy drug topiramate would be called active against inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease. And cimetidine over-the-counter drug, which inhibits the production of acid in the stomach and is used to treat heartburn, corresponded to some type of lung cancer.
To confirm this last link, the researchers studied the compound in a mouse model of lung cancer. They showed that the slowdown of cell growth of human lung cancer, but not cancer cells in these mice kidney. Similarly, giving topiramate at colitis rats reduces swelling and ulceration in animals.
John Overington, a computer chemical biologist at the European Institute of Bioinformatics in Hinxton, U.K., is not convinced that these two particular drugs go very far. "Topiramate hitting many targets and has side effects complexes, while the doses needed for functional effects cimetidine seemed high," he warns. But he praises the main idea of the paper. "This is a very important concept, it is almost like they are looking for an antidote to a disease." Stefan Schreiber, an expert on the genetics of inflammatory bowel diseases at the University of Kiel in Germany, acknowledges that the idea behind the paper is more important than the two drug candidates. "This is a proof of principle," he said. "The main point is that someone took all the genomic data available and shown what you can do with it."
The possibilities are growing rapidly, said Butte. "When we started the project 5 years ago, we had data for a hundred diseases and 164 compounds, he said." Today it would be about 1,400 illnesses and 300 molecules. "Butte hope that scientists and pharmaceutical companies continue to make public data available. Unknown to many more drugs benefits waiting to be discovered, he said.
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