A recent study shows that several medicines used otherwise can kill cancer cells. Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute analyzed thousands of already developed drug compounds and found that almost 50 of them have previously unrecognized anti-cancer activity. This study may present novel anticancer drug mechanisms and targets. Some of these drugs killed cancer cells in unexpected ways such as activating a protein or stabilizing a protein-protein interaction. For example tepoxalin, a drug for osteoarthritis in dogs, killed cancer cells by hitting an unknown target in cells that overexpress the protein MDR1, which commonly confers resistance to chemotherapy drugs.
In quest of Molecular Biology of Cancer