Viagra, originally designed as a remedy for hypertension, or the administration of nitroglycerin in patients with cardiovascular ailments are famous examples of what we could call “rebound” or “fluke” drugs, compounds created for a specific purpose and that end up being more useful in other pathologies.
This is the case of the discovery just announced by a group of North American researchers in the journal Cancer Research : drugs that are commonly prescribed to treat tachycardias, heart failure and arrhythmias or infections could have anticancer effects . Specifically, 14 compounds in common use have been screened after testing more than 1,100 medicines approved by the US health authorities.
The researchers’ goal is to find an antidote to the insidious modus operandi of cancer , which silences through epigenetic mechanisms – to put it briefly, the way in which external factors modify the expression of genes – the cellular DNA responsible for suppressing tumors.
“We have found that altering calcium fluxes can serve our purpose . All the selected drugs act on the calcium channel and activate an enzyme with an antitumor effect ”, explains Noël Ryan , principal investigator of the work and professor at the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Montreal (Canada).
It so happens that half of the candidates are the so-called cardiac or digitalis glycosides (compounds derived from the digital plant, Digitalis purpurea), which is in line with the statistics, since patients taking this drug contract fewer malignant tumors. And if they do, their effects are less aggressive.
