New Delhi, Jan 17 (UNI) A drug that's commonly used to treat high blood pressure is being repurposed for a rare tissue cancer in Europe. The medication, named propranolol, was recently granted Orphan Drug Designation by the European Commission (EC). A 69-year-old woman with metastatic angiosarcoma made a full recovery after being treated with propranolol by Shripad Banavali, an oncologist at Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, India and Eddy Pasquier, a researcher at the University of Aix-Marseille. The results were published in ecancermedicalscience. After witnessing the patient's improvement, Drs Banavali and Pasquier were prompted to go even further; just a year later, the two successfully treated seven patients with inoperable angiosarcoma, as described in EBioMedicine. "What surprised us the most about this new treatment is the fact that we got 100 percent clinical response, which is defined as either tumor regression or stabilisation of the disease," says Pasquier. "This is not a cure in the sense that most patients will eventually see their disease progress, but this level of response is still very impressive, especially in this patient population with a very bleak prognosis; we're talking patients whose prognosis was roughly one year, give or take a few months." The cancer affects approximately one quarter of a million people living in Europe, and is generally considered difficult to treat. "People with soft tissue sarcomas have a very poor survival rate," says Brad Bryan, a biomedical scientist at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centre El Paso (TTUHSC El Paso). "Four out of 10 patients with the cancer will die and are in urgent need of new treatment options." Propranolol's ability to treat angiosarcoma, a very lethal form of soft tissue sarcoma, was originally discovered by Bryan's TTUHSC El Paso lab. In his study, Bryan used cell lines and animal models to show that propranolol could fight angiosarcoma and remarkably reduce the growth of tumors; the results were published in a 2013 PLOS One paper. Later, in a 2015 JAMA Dermatology article, Bryan described treating a patient with angiosarcoma - who only had months left to live - and bringing the tumor down to undetectable levels. What's more, the treatment had little to no side effects. Several scientists across the world have reported similar results since then, testing propranolol on their own patients with the rare cancer. "Our ultimate objective is to have propranolol, if proven effective, fully licensed as a new standard of care treatment for angiosarcoma," says Pan Pantziarka, an oncology researcher at the Anticancer Fund. "Bryan's research was important because not only did it demonstrate the validity of this approach in animal models, but it also illustrated the effect of treatment in a patient for whom existing treatments are unlikely to be effective." In an age of soaring cancer drug prices, propranolol offers a glimmer of hope for the checkbooks of some cancer patients. First developed in the 1960s, today, propranolol is a generic drug, meaning it's available for a relatively affordable price. Current prescription drug therapies for sarcomas can cost patients upwards of
10,000 a month. Propranolol, however, costs about
4 a month. UNI YSG SNU 1531