Milan, October 20 – In an article published in the Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology journal entitled “Drug repurposing in oncology—patient and health systems opportunities”, Francesco Bertolini of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan (Italy), Vikas Sukhatme of Harvard Medical School and Gauthier Bouche of the Anticancer Fund in Brussels (Belgium) propose a new way to reconsider the large arsenal of drugs already available for cancer or for other diseases such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. This strategy is a unique opportunity for patients and for national health systems. The preclinical and clinical development will certainly be safer because the side effects are already known, but also faster and cheaper as existing knowledge about the drugs reduces the amount of work and time.
Success stories involving the repurposing strategy in oncology have so far been limited, but have had a big impact, exemplified by thalidomide, a drug made infamous for serious effects on unborn children in the sixties, and now used with great success to treat multiple myeloma. Good old aspirin is another successful case of repurposing, in light of the results of its role in preventing colon cancer.
<<The European Institute of Oncology is already actively pursuing “repurposing” on various fronts with pre-clinical and clinical trials focused on very low toxicity drugs such as the Metformin, in the studio of breast carcinoma, the Fluorouracil and the tyrosine kinase inhibitors in hematological malignancies ' , said Francesco Bertolini.>>
The National Healthcare Systems can no longer bear the cost of new “targeted” cancer drugs. The average cost of treatment with a new cancer drug rose from $100 per month in the 1990s to $10,000 per month in 2011, and the biopharmaceutical industry, with an average cost of more than $ 105,000 per employee, is the most expensive productive sector in the world.