Cancer researchers are testing whether a generic drug that has been used for more than 40 years to treat parasitic infections may also help fight cancer.
The tests of mebendazole are part of a growing effort to take a fresh look at old medicines to see if they can be repurposed for new uses.
I first learned about mebendazole several years back when my son came home from camp with a gross but common infection: pinworms.
My pediatrician prescribed two doses of mebendazole, and two weeks later the infection was gone.
Flash-forward a couple of years, and I was surprised to find on clinicaltrials.gov, the federal database of medical trials, that mebendazole was being investigated as a potential cancer drug.
Curious, I contacted Gregory Riggins, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University who is testing the safety of mebendazole as a potential cancer treatment. He invited me to his lab in Baltimore.
Riggins took me inside and showed me cages of cancer research mice. A few years back, he said, his idea to test mebendazole started here.
Some of the lab animals got infected with pinworms, the same parasite my son had. The veterinarian at Johns Hopkins treated the whole colony of mice with an animal version of mebendazole.
The drug staved off the parasite, but it also did something surprising. Before the mice were treated for pinworms, Riggins and his team had implanted cancer cells into the animals’ brains.
But after the mice got the pinworm drug, the cancers never developed. “Our medulloblastoma stopped growing,” Riggins says. He found out that other researchers were conducting animal studies to see if the drug had effects on lung cancer and melanoma.
So he got funding to do two Phase 1 studies to test whether mebendazole is safe to use in brain cancer patients, one in children and another in adults. So far the drug appears to be safe and well tolerated by patients, Riggins says. That would be expected, given that it has been used for decades around the world to treat pinworms.
Read more at NPR.org
