Antidepressant could beat deadliest type of brain cancer

[Sly Saint]

It is among the most feared cancers; a rapidly-growing brain tumour that kills half of its victims within a year.

Now, experts say they may have discovered an unlikely yet accessible treatment for the brain cancer glioblastoma — a little-known antidepressant called vortioxetine

Swiss scientists, who analysed the effects of 130 different medicines on brain cancer tissue, found vortioxetine was the most effective at destroying diseased cells.

Further research on mice with glioblastoma also suggested the drug slowed the growth of tumours and shrunk them, with this effect super-boosted when combined with chemotherapy.

Experts believe the pill is effective because, unlike others, it is able to cross the blood-brain barrier — meaning it bypasses the membrane that stops substances entering the brain.

Professor Michael Weller, study co-author and an expert in neuroscience at University Hospital Zurich, said: 'The advantage of vortioxetine is that it is safe and very cost-effective.

..
Two further trials are now planned in patients in order to see if it enhances the tumour-shrinking power of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Experts say, should it prove effective, vortioxetine will be the first medicine in recent decades to improve the treatment of glioblastoma.

Antidepressant could beat deadliest type of brain cancer (msn.com)

 

[rvallee]

At some point they're really going to have to clean-up the nomenclature because this is outlandishly far from having anything to do with treating 'depression'.

For all the flack that they give us about ME not being a valid name, antidepressant for this class of drugs is at least just as ridiculous.

 

[Nightsong]

High-throughput identification of repurposable neuroactive drugs with potent anti-glioblastoma activity

Glioblastoma, the most aggressive primary brain cancer, has a dismal prognosis, yet systemic treatment is limited to DNA-alkylating chemotherapies. New therapeutic strategies may emerge from exploring neurodevelopmental and neurophysiological vulnerabilities of glioblastoma. To this end, we systematically screened repurposable neuroactive drugs in glioblastoma patient surgery material using a clinically concordant and single-cell resolved platform. Profiling more than 2,500 ex vivo drug responses across 27 patients and 132 drugs identified class-diverse neuroactive drugs with potent anti-glioblastoma efficacy that were validated across model systems. Interpretable molecular machine learning of drug–target networks revealed neuroactive convergence on AP-1/BTG-driven glioblastoma suppression, enabling expanded in silico screening of more than 1 million compounds with high patient validation accuracy. Deep multimodal profiling confirmed Ca2+-driven AP-1/BTG-pathway induction as a neuro-oncological glioblastoma vulnerability, epitomized by the anti-depressant vortioxetine synergizing with current standard-of-care chemotherapies in vivo. These findings establish an actionable framework for glioblastoma treatment rooted in its neural etiology.

Nature Medicine (September 2024) | Link | PDF (Open access)