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Study Finds Arsenic Could be a Potential Cancer Treatment
Arsenic trioxide has been used as a therapy for a particular type of leukemia for more than 10 years.
Combining arsenic with other therapies may give doctors a two-pronged approach to beating back forms of the disease caused by a malfunction in a critical cellular signaling cascade called the Hedgehog pathway.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has already approved arsenic trioxide for use in humans, which could pave the way for clinical trials of this approach.
"Many pharmaceutical companies are developing anticancer drugs to inhibit the Hedgehog pathway," said Dr. Philip Beachy, senior author of the study.
In addition, Beachy recently identified an antifungal drug commonly used in humans, itraconazole, as a Hedgehog pathway inhibitor.
"However, these compounds target a component of the pathway that can be mutated with patients then becoming resistant to the therapy. Arsenic blocks a different step of the cascade," he said.
The researchers studied the effect of arsenic trioxide in cultured human and mouse cells and in laboratory mice with a brain tumour known as medulloblastoma.
They found that relatively low levels of the compound, equivalent to those approved for use in treating patients with acute promyelocytic leukaemia, block one of the last steps of the Hedgehog pathway; it prevents the expression of a select few of the cell's genes in response to external messages.
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