A new study reveals that a common class of drug used to control high blood pressure could enhance cancer treatment by improving delivery of chemotherapy drugs and oxygen through tumors. A clinical trial is already in progress as a result of the study.
Writing about their work in the online journal Nature Communications, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, describe how the angiotensin inhibitor losartan increased blood flow and improved chemotherapy drug outcomes in mice with breast and pancreatic cancer.
Senior author Dr. Rakesh K. Jain, director of the Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology at MGH, says:
“Angiotensin inhibitors are safe blood pressure medications that have been used for over a decade in patients and could be repurposed for cancer treatment.”
A class of drug called anti-angiogenesis drugs is already being used to improve blood flow through tumors to enhance cancer treatment.
But Dr. Jain points out that those drugs work by repairing the abnormal structure of tumor blood vessels, whereas angiotensin inhibitors open collapsed blood vessels: they release the physical forces that compress tumor blood vessels when the gel-like matrix that surrounds them expands as the tumor grows.
For their study, the researchers focused on how the structure and biology of tumors can impede cancer treatment.
In a previous piece of work, they had already discovered that by stopping the formation of collagen, a main constituent of the extracellular matrix, losartan helps distribute nanomedicines in tumors
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