Pill may hold cancer key
A COMMON pill used to treat anxiety and high blood pressure could become a breast cancer wonder drug.
In a breakthrough discovery that could eventually save lives, a Melbourne study has found beta-blockers slow the spread of the disease that killed an estimated 3000 Australian women last year.
Beta-blockers work by blocking the body’s stress response.
Ordinarily adrenaline would make your heart pump harder or faster, but beta blockers stop adrenaline from communicating with your heart so this doesn’t happen.
The Monash University study discovered the drug, propranolol, ultimately stopped cancer cells being spread through the body.
Researchers say cancer spreading is one of the biggest factors in breast cancer deaths.
The findings are the first to demonstrate the use of betablockers in independently reducing the spread of cancer cells, giving hope to the almost 20,000 Australians diagnosed with breast cancer every year.
Associate Professor Erica Sloan, from Monash University, said the clinical trial aimed to look at the short term effects the common drug could have.
“We wanted to test whether blocking stress pathways in patients would have an effect on how the cancer progresses – so whether it would spread,” she said.
“We were looking at early indicators – or whether or not the disease would progress – whether the beta-blocker could turn on or off genes in the tumour that the tumour would otherwise spread.”
Dr Sloan began the study in 2016 after her previous work indicated the changes betablockers could create.
“(The women) received a beta-blocker or placebo from the time of diagnosis, through until their operation,” she said.
“(That’s) about seven to 10 days – it’s a really short period but as you can imagine it’s very stressful.”
To measure whether the beta-blockers had reduced the cancer spreading, researchers looked to patients’ genes for answers.
“What we found is that in the patients who are taking the beta blocker, (they) tended to have the genes ‘turned off.”
Sixty women with earlystage breast cancer diagnosis’ – those classified as stage one, two, or three – were chosen for the trial, which worked closely with a team from the Peter Maccallum Cancer Centre led by Dr Jonathan Hiller.
The four-year study tested the anti-stress drug on a group of women with the disease, with half of participants given the new drug and half a placebo.
Dr Sloan said the trial provided the groundwork for even bigger studies to take place to ultimately understand if the drug could be used to combat cancer on a wider scale.
“The next steps would be to look at survival,” she said. “The important message is that this provided some of the first evidence in patients that stopping stress can slow cancer progression. It suggests that these pathways are important in cancer progression.”
THE IMPORTANT MESSAGE IS THAT THIS PROVIDED SOME OF THE FIRST EVIDENCE IN PATIENTS THAT STOPPING STRESS CAN SLOW CANCER PROGRESSION
DR ERICA SLOAN