An old drug prescribed to help people stop drinking alcohol may be an effective cancer-killer, according to new study.
The drug, Antabuse, appears to ‘freeze’ cancer in place, preventing them from getting rid of waste, which, ultimately, kills them.
Danish and Czech researchers tested the drug in live mice and human cancer cells and found that it was effective in both without harming other cells.
These findings are not enough to indicate how Antabuse would behave in living people, but the drug is already FDA-approved and its patent is long expired, so if further testing is as promising as this study’s findings, the drug could someday be a cheap alternative cancer treatment.
The new study found that Antabuse effectively ‘froze’ breast cancer cells as well as those of prostate, colon and other cancers, eventually killing them
Scientists were first tipped off to the Antabuse’s potential power against cancer by a series of unfortunate coincidences documented in a 1971 case study.
Doctors prescribed the drug to a 38-year-old woman who had turned to alcoholism to cope with her losing battle with breast cancer, which had spread to her bones.
Her physicians halted her cancer treatment and gave her Antabuse.
She lived for another 10 years before a drunken fall from a window killed her.
When they performed an autopsy, the doctors were shocked to find that while Antabuse had evidently not stopped the woman from drinking, the cancer cells had largely disappeared from her bones.
That remarkable case sparked a few small-scale trials in animals and humans. In both, Antabuse improved survival and slowed tumor growth, but scientists couldn’t explain why.
In 2015, the drug saw another revival for a novel use. Research showed that it was able to ‘wake up’ dormant HIV cells, which could help to ensure that the virus is completely wiped from a person’s body by targeting the reactivated cells with an effective treatment.
The new study, published in Nature, combined analysis of Denmark’s extensive registry of cancer patients with close observation of how Antabuse interacts with cells.
Antabuse disables a liver enzyme that is critical to the body’s ability to break down alcohol, causing patients to hyperventilate, get nauseous and sometimes vomit.
But findings from Palacky University in the Czech Republic and the Danish Cancer Society show that the drug may have more powerful effects than inducing a nasty, preemptive hangover.
For 1,177 Danish patients that continuously took the anti-alcohol drug, the death rate was 34 percent lower. Antabuse was associated with better survival of all cancers, including breast, prostate and colon cancers.
Compelling though those numbers are, they do not establish that Antabuse was the definitive cause behind the better survival rates in humans.
In mice, however, the researchers observed and confirmed that the drug slowed the speed of breast cancer tumor growth, especially in combination with copper.
The main byproduct of Antabuse combines with copper to jam up cancer cells’ disposal processes for ill-formed proteins. This essentially ‘freezes’ the cancer cells, until their functions are shut down by the backed up proteins.
Antabuse particularly has this effect on cancer cells, the researchers observed, leaving healthy cells unharmed.