The drug called decitabine is used to treat myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of cancer that produces abnormal blood forming cells in bone marrow.
The researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that decitabine significantly affected a subset of breast cancer tumors that were both triple negative for hormone receptors and also had elevated levels of a protein called DNA methyl Transferase proteins.
Triple negative breast cancer tumors grow independent of receptors for estrogen, progesterone and hormone epidermal growth factor, known as HER-2/neu. These tumors tend to be more aggressive than positive tumors and do not respond to treatments that target those hormone receptors such as Herceptin, tamoxifen, and others.
“There is a great need to identify additional treatment options for triple-negative breast cancer, which is one of the most difficult to treat subtypes of breast cancer,” says Mayo researcher Liewei Wang, M.D., Ph.D. “The study is a demonstration that we can take advantage of many existing FDA approved drugs to expand their usage by better understanding the mechanisms of how they work and applying them to other cancers.”
The researchers plan to prospectively study the impact of decitabine in a prospective clinical trial, called BEAUTY2, which is focused on women with triple negative breast cancer that is resistant to chemotherapy.
Source: Mayo Clinic press release
Little medical evidence exists to show that these treatments are effective, but certainly there have been instances of alternative treatments leading to a complete cure.
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