An old chemotherapy drug used to kill leukemia may have the ability to help cure cancer, according to University of Missouri researchers.
The study shows that the 6-Thioguanine, or 6-TG, as a previous treatment to kill cancer cells in patients with leukemia, can cause certain DNA markers to weaken and even stop the growth of cancer cells.
Associate Professor of Oncology at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine Jeffery Bryan said the old chemo drug can make the cells work in a healthy way and reduce the bodies’ resistance to the traditional chemo therapy.
“Our hypothesis is that using these demethylating drugs, we can make these cancer stem cells more sensitive to chemo therapy so the traditional chemo therapy can kill them if we treat them in a demethylating agent first,” said Bryan.
The hypothesis has been tested on dogs. It turns out they are more responsive to chemotherapy drugs after treating with 6-TG. The dog disease can be used as the model of human disease and the drug has the expected effect on dog cells that has been show in human cells before.
“We believe that treating them with demethylating drugs before we ever start the chemotherapy may allow to be more successful chemotherapy in the long hole,” said Bryan.
Although the study is still in the early stage of the investigation, Brian and his colleagues believed the study is promising and it can show the proof of principle that these drugs work in dogs the way they work in people.
“We are proposing to expand the study and try to identify the best way to use this class of drugs so that we make our standard chemo therapy more effective,” said Bryan. “And if we can show this works for dogs, we will want to try to extend that proof of principle to people and do a better job treating cancers in people.”
This study was published in BMC Veterinary Research. Bryan’s colleagues include Senthil Kumar, an assistant research professor at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, and Brian Flesner, a former resident at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine and current faculty member at Louisiana State University.
