Antidepressants against brain tumors? A team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) has carried out an experiment with mice whose conclusion has shown the synergistic power to reduce the progression of certain very aggressive brain tumors such as glioblastoma by combining anticoagulant drugs with common antidepressants. The study has been published in the journal Cancer Cell .
To carry out the experiment, the experts gave the mice a combination therapy of antidepressants (administered orally) and anticoagulants (by injection) between five days and a week. The treatment did not cure the animals, but it did slow the progression of the disease.
For this reason, combining the action of antidepressants with anticoagulants caused in the organism of the mice the interruption, by two different biological routes, of the rate of cellular autophagy, since both achieved an overstimulation of the system causing the rapid death of the cells. carcinogenic.
Could we be facing a new therapeutic strategy for glioblastoma? “We do not yet know if patients will be able to benefit from these treatments. It seems that these drugs should be combined with other types of cancer drugs to obtain a clear benefit in the treatment of patients with glioblastoma ”, explains Douglas Hanahan, leader of the study, but the scientists are hopeful about this new route.
