A drug that treats nail fungus might also help men who have advanced prostate cancer by preventing it from getting worse and delaying the need for chemotherapy, according to research conducted at Johns Hopkins.
Right now, the oral antifungal drug itraconazole is used to treat fungal infections in nails and in some organs. But Johns Hopkins researchers grabbed it as a possible anti-cancer drug after a database review of more than 3,000 FDA-approved drugs revealed that it also appears to block tumor blood vessel growth. Johns Hopkins scientist Jun Liu checked it out in mice and found that implanted human prostate tumors shrunk when treated with itraconazole.
Next, they tested it on human subjects whose prostate cancer had spread to other organs and did not respond to hormone therapy. The study seemed to be successful for those who received high doses of itraconazole. Ordinarily, without treatment, Metastatic prostate cancer patients would worsen in 12 weeks. But a little less than half of the Johns Hopkins subject went as long as 24 weeks of stable or declining levels of PSA, a biomarker for prostate cancer.
"With these results, we believe that high-dose itraconazole is worth studying in a larger group of men with advanced prostate cancer," researcher Emmanuel Antonarakis said in a release.
- read the Johns Hopkins release