Repurposing for Cervical Cancer

One of the questions I was asked after my talk at Illinois was about repurposing drugs. I replied that there might be some opportunities there, but I didn't think that there were many big ones that had been missed, unless new biology/target ID turned up. Well, here's a news story that contradicts that view of mine, and I'm welcome to be wrong this time. Researchers in Manchester have been working on the use of lopinavir (an existing drug for HIV) as a therapy for HPV, the cause of most cervical cancers. There's a vaccine for it now, but that doesn't do much for women who are already diagnosed with probable or confirmed disease. But lopinavir therapy seems to do good, and plenty of it. A preliminary trial in Kenya has apparently shown a very high response rate, and they're now raising money for a larger (up to 1,000 patient) trial. I hope that it works out as it appears to - with any luck, HPV-driven disease will gradually disappear from the world in the coming decades, but there will be plenty of patients in the meantime. As that Daily Telegraph article shows, it wasn't easy getting this work going, because of availability of the drug in the right formulation. Congratulations to the Manchester group and their collaborators in Kenya for being so persistent.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs