Researchers discover performance-enhancing medications improve anticancer drug's efficacy

U.S. researchers discover Viagra enhances anti-cancer drug's efficiency

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University have shown that the impotence drug Viagra, in combination with doxorubicin, an anti-cancer drug, enhances its anti-tumor efficacy in prostate cancer while alleviating the damage to the heart at the same time.

For more than four decades the chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin has been used to treat a number of human cancers, including that of the prostate. Despite doxorubicin's clinical efficacy for cancer treatment, its use is associated with irreversible heart damage, often presenting several years after treatment stops. Researchers have been working over the past 15 years to find an optimal therapeutic intervention for protecting the heart against the cytotoxicity associated with doxorubicin.

In the study published online Monday in the Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers using a variety of powerful in vitro and in vivo approaches, have shown that a combination of Viagra, generically known as sildenafil, and doxorubcin significantly enhances the generation of reactive oxygen species that trigger cell death, or apoptosis, in prostate cancer cells. They also observed that the combination did not harm the normal, healthy prostate epithelial cells.

"We believe sildenafil could be an excellent candidate for incorporation into cancer treatment protocols -- with the potential of enhancing the anti-tumor efficacy, while protecting the heart against both short term and long term damage from doxorubicin," said principal investigator Rakesh Kukreja.

Kukreja is excited about the potential translational impact of this work. "My team and I are hoping to move the research forward to a clinical trial and plans are under way to do so," he said. The clinical trial would evaluate the effectiveness of the drug combination in cancer patients.

(c) 2010 Xinhua News Agency - CEIS. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.

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