NBC News
Given the shortage of treatments to stop or reverse Alzheimer’s, scientists are resorting to cancer drugs as a possible means to curb cognitive deterioration.
Alzheimer’s cases are increasing in the United States and worldwide due to the aging of the population, and there is no cure for this disease. Attempts to develop treatments that slow down their progress, instead of reducing symptoms, have frequently failed.
Only two medications – Leqembi and Kisunla antibody therapies – are currently approved by the Food and Medicines Administration (FDA) to stop the progression of the disease in its early stages, but scientists affirm that its benefits are limited.
Some pharmacists have paused or abandoned their drug development programs for Alzheimer’s due to the failure of clinical trials. Others seek to use existing medications to combat it, including drugs to lose weight.
With this in mind, researchers at the University of California in San Francisco have carried out a search for existing drugs that can be used to treat Alzheimer’s, which would also reduce the deadline to make them available to the sick. They analyzed a database of more than 1,300 drugs of various classes, including antipsychotics, antibiotics, antifungals and chemotherapy. Subsequently, they examined how these drugs affected gene expression.
His study, published Monday in the scientific journal Cell, identifies two drugs against cancer as the best candidates: combined, they seem to stop or reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice. One of the drugs is usually used to treat breast cancer; The other, before colon and lung tumors.
Alzheimer’s er is associated with significant changes in the way in which genes in the brain are expressed, which causes an increase in the production of certain proteins and a decrease in that of others. These imbalances can alter brain function and contribute to symptoms such as memory loss.
Less than 90 drugs in the data base of the researchers reversed the expression of characteristic genes related to the Alzheimer’s in human brain cells. And five drugs in particular seemed to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in real patients, according to electronic medical records. The authors finally selected two of those drugs, both approved by the FDA to treat cancer, to try them in mice.
“We did not expect cancer drugs to be the most promising,” said Marina Sirota, co -author of the study and director of the Institute of Bakar Computational Sciences of the University of California in San Francisco.
The authors indicated that letharozole, a drug against breast cancer, seemed to alter genetic expression in nerve cells. And the irinotecán, a drug against colon and lung cancer, seemed to alter that of glial cells, which support the nervous system. Alzheimer’s can destroy nerve cells and cause glial cell proliferation, which generates inflammation in the brain.
In a 2020 study, patients with breast cancer who received letrozole showed less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not receive it. Colorectal cancer survivors treated with irinotecán also presented a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, according to another 2021 study.
After trying the medications in mice, the study authors concluded that the combination of two drugs reversed cerebral degeneration and improved the memory of animals that had developed Alzheimer’s symptoms when aging.
