Is it true that drugs not designed to be used as chemotherapy can have an anti-cancer effect?
That's the question behind the study that Steven Corsello recently published in Nature Cancer, testing 4,518 existing drugs against 578 different cancer cell lines. The researchers found that an unexpectedly large number of drugs for non-cancer use also have anticancer activity. This effect was predictable by studying the molecular characteristics of the tumor cell line.
The results of this study reinforce the idea behind the Campania Oncoterapie project which aims at an in-depth characterization of tumors in order to better design more effective and less invasive precision oncotherapies.