12 Jan Drug Repurposing Trial Suggests Statins May Improve Survival in Small Cell Lung Cancer
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Glen Weiss, MD, MBA
Director of Clinical Research & Medical Oncologist
and Dr. Zoltan Lohinai MD
National Koranyi Institute of Pulmonology
Budapest, Hungary
Western Regional Medical Center
Cancer Treatment Centers of America
Goodyear, Arizona
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: With nearly 1.4 million deaths each year, lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer-related mortality. In the U.S., more than 162,000 die annually of this disease.
One subtype of this cancer, small cell lung cancer (SCLC), is one of the most progressive tumor types. No new class of systemic treatment has been adopted as a new benchmark for standard therapy against SCLC for nearly three decades. Lung cancer researchers focus on SCLC not only because of its scientific challenge, but also because of their great desire to help patients suffering from this aggressive tumor.
Drug repurposing bioinformatical analysis, a new research direction, has found that FDA-approved drugs in non-malignant diseases may have antitumor effects. Our study attempted to evaluate the recent laboratory findings in a clinical setting. Statins are a class of drugs primarily used to lower cholesterol in patients at risk for heart disease. They have been hypothesized by preclinical data to affect tumor cells through the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathway, which regulates many cellular functions.
Our study of 876 metastatic-stage small cell lung cancer patients, published Jan. 6, 2015, in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS ONE, showed that statins appeared to provide an increase in overall survival for those cancer patients who were prescribed those medications. Patients prescribed other classes of drugs, including aspirin, antidepressants, and blood pressure-lowering agents, have reportedly shown anti-SCLC activity in previous preclinical studies. However, our study found no such survival benefits.
All in all, our study is a good example of how to evaluate drug repurposing in oncology, and that statins might have clinical relevance in the treatment of SCLC.
MedicalResearch: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?
Response: Statins were the only medications that increased overall survival in combination with the standard-of-care chemotherapy in patients suffering from SCLC. Other factors shown to increase overall survival were younger age, good performance status, and radiation therapy. Drug repositioning data from preclinical studies, or from small numbers of patients, may not have clinical relevance, and should be interpreted with caution until they are validated in larger patient samples.
MedicalResearch: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Response: Our observations underline the future directions and potential possibilities of computer bioinformatics analysis and lab data in the clinical setting. Importantly, another key finding based on our results is that we were not able to prove any significant survival benefit with medications acting on the G-protein coupled receptors considered to be most relevant in SCLC by recent laboratory, animal models of cancer testing, and computer analysis approaches. However, the small number of cases in this part of our study did not allow us to draw a firm conclusion. Our study might help focus future research directions in study drugs that are likely more relevant in lung cancer.
Citation:
PLoS One. 2016 Jan 6;11(1):e0144797. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144797. eCollection 2016.
Lohinai Z1,2, Dome P3,4, Szilagyi Z1, Ostoros G1, Moldvay J1, Hegedus B5,6, Dome B1,5,7, Weiss GJ2
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Glen Weiss, MD, MBA, & and Dr. Zoltan Lohinai MD (2016). Drug Repurposing Trial Suggests Statins May Improve Survival in Small Cell Lung Cancer
Last Updated on January 12, 2016 by Marie Benz MD FAAD