Mining data on FDA-OK'd drugs leads to potential cancer treatment

How does the anti-malaria drug chloroquine help patients with aggressive breast cancer? It's a question that Dr. Jenny Chang, director of the Methodist Cancer Center in Houston, aims to answer in a new study. "Our team of clinicians and researchers from both the Methodist Cancer Center and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute applied mathematical and bioinformatics models to screen for existing FDA-approved medications that might be effective against cancer stem cells," said Chang in a statement. "We identified chloroquine as [a] potential cancer stem cell killer." Release