St George’s University. UK: Medical experts say a common malaria drug could have a significant
impact on colorectal cancer providing a cheap adjunct to current
expensive chemotherapy. A pilot study by researchers at St George’s, University of London,
has found the drug artesunate, which is a widely used anti-malaria
medicine, had a promising effect on reducing the multiplication of
tumour cells in colorectal cancer patients who were already going to
have their cancer surgically removed.
Colorectal cancer (CRC) makes up about 10 percent of the annual 746,000 global cancer cases in men and 614,000 cases in women.
In the UK, 110 new cases are diagnosed daily, with older patients
particularly at risk of death. Prognosis even with the best available
treatments does not increase disease free or overall survival beyond 60
percent, five years after diagnosis.
Professor Sanjeev Krishna, an infectious disease expert at St
George’s who jointly-led the study, said: “There is therefore a
continuing and urgent need to develop new, cheap, orally effective and
safe colorectal cancer treatments.
“Our approach in this study was to take a close look at an existing
drug that already had some anticancer properties in experimental
settings, and to assess its safety and efficacy in patients.
“The results have been more than encouraging and can offer hopes of
finding effective treatment options that are cheaper in the future.”
“Larger clinical studies with artesunate that aim to provide well
tolerated and convenient anticancer regimens should be implemented with
urgency, and may provide an intervention where none is currently
available, as well as synergistic benefits with current treatment
regimens,” added Professor Devinder Kumar, a leading expert in
colorectal cancer at St George’s and joint-lead of this study.
For most patients globally, access to advanced treatments is
difficult as they are too expensive to be widely available, or
associated with significant morbidity thereby further compromising their
survival.
“In the St George’s study, patients were examined and then were given
either the anti-malaria drug artesunate or a placebo. After 42 months
following surgery, there were six recurrences of cancer in the placebo
group (of 12 patients) and one recurrence in an artesunate recipient (of
10 patients).The survival beyond two years in the artesunate group was
estimated at 91% whilst surviving the first recurrence of cancer in the
placebo group was only 57%.
This is the first randomized, double blind study to test the anti-CRC
properties of oral artesunate. The anticancer properties of
artemisinins have been seen in the laboratory previously but this is the
first time their effect has been seen in patients in a rigorously
designed study.
The paper, A Randomised, Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled
Pilot Study of Oral Artesunate Therapy for Colorectal Cancer, has been
published in the journal EBioMedicine.com (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352396414000346)