Repurposing Itraconazole to Treat Cancer?

Submitted by GAtherton on 22 June 2016

Many prescription drugs currently in use have many properties, some of which may be part of the reason why they work for the purpose they have approval for but they may well have more useful properties – and they may be found to be useful to treat other illnesses.

For example, ebselen is used to treat stroke but when a research group in Oxford, UK screened 450 drugs for activity to help bipolar patients they found that ebselen also had what they were looking for – it instantly became a candidate to test for the treatment of bipolar patients. Drugs such as ebselen that are already in use have already passed many basic tests and phase 1 trials and if if repurposed can pass straight onto phase 2 trials, saving years and a lot of expense so this can be a quick and effective way to get new treatments into clinics.

Not surprisingly this approach is popular and the US National Institutes of Health and UK Medical Research Council are strongly supporting this research along with many pharmaceutical companies, health charities, universities and service providers.

Interestingly there is an antifungal drug that is being investigated for the purpose of using it to treat cancer!

Itraconazole has anti-angiogenic activity and has undergone clinical trials that have shown it to have beneficial activities when tested in prostate, lung and basal call carcinoma patients. In addition it shows promise when being used in combination with other anti-cancer drugs, possibly synergising with a range of such drugs, enhancing their effectiveness.

Many more clinical trials are underway to further test and investigate the use of itraconazole to treat cancers – at the time of writing this blog there were 16 trials ongoing and 22 completed.