美国国家公共电台 NPR A Pinworm Medication Is Being Tested As A Potential Anti-Cancer Drug

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: 

In Your Health on this Monday morning, cancer researchers are testing whether a cheap, safe drug that's been used for more than 40 years to treat parasitic 1 infections might also help to fight cancer. The research is part of a growing movement to take a fresh look at old medicines to see if they have new uses. And NPR's Allison Aubrey has more.

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE 2: I happened to come across this drug called mebendazole several years back. My son came home from summer camp with this gross infection - pinworms. These are tiny, staple-sized worms that infect the intestines 3. They make kids feel itchy and uncomfortable. My pediatrician prescribed mebendazole, a cheap, generic 4 drug. Two weeks later, the infection was gone.

Now flash forward a couple of years, and I was stunned 5 to find on a research website, clinicaltrials.gov, that the same medicine, mebendazole, was being investigated as a cancer drug. Curious, I reached out to Greg Riggins at Johns Hopkins University. He's a cancer researcher there. He's testing the mebendazole in brain cancer patients, and he invited me to Baltimore to talk about it.

GREG RIGGINS: Here is the laboratory.

AUBREY: Tell me where we're standing 6, what we have in front of us.

RIGGINS: So we have cages of mice. These are our cancer research mice.

AUBREY: A few years back, something extraordinary happened here. Some of the lab animals got pinworm, the same thing my son had, and the veterinarian at Hopkins treated the whole colony of mice with the animal version of mebendazole. The drug staved off the parasite 8, but it also did something else. Now remember, these are lab mice that are used for experiments. Researchers had implanted cancer cells from a tumor 9 called medulloblastoma into the animals' brains. But after they got the pinworm drug, the cancers never developed.

RIGGINS: Our medulloblastoma stops growing.

AUBREY: This was completely unexpected.

RIGGINS: We were surprised.

AUBREY: But after doing some research, Riggins realized he was not the first to see the anti-cancer properties of mebendazole. There were already researchers who were doing animal studies to see if the drug worked against lung cancer and melanoma. So Riggins decided 10 to take his research to the next level - in people. He got funding to do a study to see of mebendazole might help people with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive brain cancers. Phase one of the trial has wrapped up, and he has some initial results.

RIGGINS: The data, to me, looks as good as it could get for a phase-1 trial.

AUBREY: Now, mebendazole is not a miracle cure. But Riggins says the drug seems to interfere 11 with cancer cells in a variety of ways. For example, it disrupts the development of blood vessels 12, which can starve tumors of the blood supply they need to thrive. So he says the next phase of this trial will be to find out if the drug can actually buy very sick patients more time.

RIGGINS: The odds 13 would favor that it is increasing survival.

AUBREY: He stresses the initial data are preliminary. But Riggins says what he has learned about mebendazole has made him think it might have another role to play in fighting cancer. For example, it's possible it could help prevent the development of certain tumors. He is studying a hereditary 14 form of colon 7 cancer. He's already published a study showing mebendazole has a preventive effect in lab animals. Now he's planning a study to test this in people at high risk.

RIGGINS: If you can prevent a cancer, you don't have to worry about, you know, the heroic efforts to try to cure it. I mean, a cancer that never happens is the best kind of cancer.

AUBREY: In addition to the trials in Baltimore, other labs around the country and in Mexico are studying the potential of mebendazole to prevent or treat other cancers. And Bruce Bloom, who is the president and chief science officer of a group called Cures within Reach, which helps to fund the research, says he has proposals for more studies sitting on his desk.

BRUCE BLOOM: We're very optimistic that mebendazole has a potent 15 anti-cancer mechanism 16.

AUBREY: And it certainly isn't the only existing drug that could be repurposed to fight cancer and other diseases.

BLOOM: It's amazing how many inexpensive drugs that have been around for 25 years or more, like mebendazole, have so many other opportunities to help unsolved disease patients.

AUBREY: Bloom points to research on the diabetes 17 drug metformin and the heart medication propranolol as well as mebendazole.

BLOOM: It's not likely that mebendazole or any other single repurposed drug is ever going to cure cancer. But each one of them combined with other repurposed drugs can create a cocktail 18 that helps the body to manage cancer.

AUBREY: In other words, the idea is to help buy people more time. He says considering it can cost a billion dollars to develop a new drug, repurposing existing drugs may help bring therapies to patients more quickly and affordably - at least that's the hope.

INSKEEP: And we've been listening to NPR's Allison Aubrey who's in our studios to continue the discussion about Your Health.

And Allison, wow. This makes me want to go rummage 19 around in the medicine chest to see if there's some old prescription 20 bottle we can repurpose for something new.

AUBREY: Right. There's a lot of optimism here, Steve. But I have to say there's a big concern with mebendazole, too. You heard Dr. Riggins say it's this affordable 21 drug around the globe.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

AUBREY: And it is. You can walk into a pharmacy 22 in Mexico or in Brazil. You can buy it over the counter for a few bucks 23. And that used to be true here. When my son had pinworms, the cost of mebendazole in the U.S. was $3 a pill. Now - $369 a pill.

INSKEEP: The very same drug is more than 100 times more. Why is that fair?

AUBREY: The very same drug. So remember, the cancer research is very preliminary. This drug is intended for use as a pinworm drug, right? Now back in 2011, the company that made this drug, Teva, decided to pull it from the market. They decided not to sell it anymore. It actually went off the market for a few years, then the drug changed hands a couple of times.

So I reached out to this company called Impax Laboratories. They're the company that acquired mebendazole. And I said - what is going on here? You know, this drug is $3 around the globe. How can you be charging $369 for it? And they basically said to me - look, we spent millions of dollars acquiring the drug from Teva. We had to go through an approval process, so that's what the price is.

INSKEEP: Three sixty-nine.

Allison, thanks very much.

AUBREY: Thanks very much, Steve.

INSKEEP: That's Your Health - NPR's Allison Aubrey.