Adult Cancer Drugs may Help Fight Aggressive Childhood Brain Tumors

Researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have found two already used drugs primarily for the treatment of breast, pancreatic, lung and other cancers, to possibly lengthen the survival of high-risk brain tumors in children.

The study showed that the drugs pemetrexed and gemcitabine killed cells from mouse and human brain tumors, called group 3 medulloblastomas that were grown in the laboratory and typically diagnosed in 400 children annually in the United States. They are also the most common pediatric brain tumors, according to researchers.

Yet findings showed that the duo drug combination had the power to double the life expectancy of mice with human group 3 medulloblastoma--the worst prognosis--compared to other mice in the study who were left untreated. Yet when the same drugs were combined with chemotherapy treatments, researchers further discovered that the mice had the ability to live even longer.

The study notes the following regarding the identification of the drugs, courtesy of a press release: "The drugs were identified by screening the St. Jude library of 7,389 compounds looking for ones that targeted group 3 mouse tumor cells rather than normal mouse brain cells. The library included all 830 drugs U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. Pemetrexed and gemcitabine emerged as the top candidates, based in part on their ability to kill group 3 medulloblastoma tumor cells at concentrations that researchers showed were safe and achievable in patients."

"Our focus was to identify drugs that we could move quickly from the laboratory to the clinic where new chemotherapy options are desperately needed for these high-risk medulloblastoma patients," said the study's corresponding author Martine Roussel, Ph.D., a member of the St. Jude Department of Tumor Cell Biology, via the release. "As a basic scientist, it is exciting to be able to translate a laboratory discovery into drugs that are now being used in a clinical trial."

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More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Cancer Cell.