Old drugs, new tricks: several non-oncology drugs can kill cancer cells

Research from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (both MA, USA) has uncovered several non-oncology drugs that are able to target and destroy cancer cells in the lab. The study, published in Nature Cancer, could be used in the development of new cancer drugs and repurposing of existing drugs. It’s not uncommon for scientists to stumble upon new uses for existing medicines, but researchers at the Dana-Farber and Broad Institute didn’t expect to find that so many existing compounds had anti-cancer properties. In this study, researchers examined the entire collection of clinically approved, mostly...