The results of a study conducted by cell biologists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (USA) are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Researchers tested about two and a half thousand existing drugs in order to find one that will kill cancer cells with maximum efficiency. These drugs turned out to be statins – a popular class of drugs that lower blood cholesterol, in particular, the drug pitavastatin. Most of the other drugs either had no effect on the cells at all, or they killed both normal and malignant cells equally well. Pitavastatin caused the death of almost all malignant cells and almost did not affect healthy ones.
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Further experiments showed that pitavastatin not only inhibits the activity of the liver enzyme, which determines the production of cholesterol, but also blocks the synthesis of molecules of another substance, GGPP, which is key for the survival of cancer cells, providing the nutrition process. As a result, cancer cells lose their ability to feed energy from the environment and actually die of hunger.
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The results may explain why people who take statins for a long time are less likely to get cancer, and if they get sick, then in a less aggressive form, the researchers noted. They did not exclude that in the future, statins can be involved in treatment regimens for various types of cancer.
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