�Researchers at the NYU Cancer Institute and the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology have identified mebendazole, a drug victimised globally to treat parasitic infections, as a novel investigational agent for the treatment of chemotherapy-resistant malignant melanoma.
Because most patients with metastatic melanoma fail to reply to available therapies, the discovery of a viable investigational discourse with an established safety device profile could address a serious unmet need in oncology. Effectively sidestepping the prohibitive costs and long lead times typically required to find new crab medicines, the NYU squad screened a library of already approved drugs for activity against the most deadly form of skin cancer.
Their report, which was selected for advance online publication by Molecular Cancer Research, is published in the August issue of the journal. Since submitting the article for publication, the authors have conducted additional pre-clinical studies of mebendazole in an in vivo model of chemotherapy-resistant malignant melanoma and ar now preparing a phase I clinical trial, expected to commence next year at NYU Cancer Institute.
"While rational drug design remains a perfectly valid way to develop crab therapies, we also motivation approaches that are less costly and more productive of new effective treatments," said trail author Seth J. Orlow, M.D. Ph.D., Chair of the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at New York University School of Medicine. "You could say this is more of a guerrilla advance. Instead of screening millions of untested compounds for an agent that inhibits or stimulates a particular molecular target area, we chose to screen a prominent library of already approved drugs for novel activity against melanoma cells, and then raise the most promising campaigner rapidly to clinical
