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Testing cheap old drugs, aspirin, metformin, statins, beta-blockers, as cancer treatments, because they are safe, available and sometimes work.
Large randomised trials of repurposed agents have mostly been negative: metformin did not improve invasive disease-free survival in the adjuvant breast cancer trial MA.32 (NCT01101438), while aspirin continues to be tested for adjuvant benefit (Add-Aspirin, NCT02804815) and is established in Lynch syndrome prevention. AI screening of prescription and expression databases now proposes candidates faster than trials can test them, and funding for non-proprietary agents is the real bottleneck.
Approved drugs with known safety are tested against cancer endpoints, either on mechanistic grounds or on signals mined from real-world prescription data.
Ivermectin is a worm and parasite medicine that is being tested as an add-on to immunotherapy in two small early trials. No trial has shown that it treats any cancer, and people who have dosed themselves outside a trial have ended up in hospital with seizures or liver damage.
Mebendazole is a human worm medicine that has been through two very small cancer trials: a dose-finding study in brain tumours found a tolerable dose, and a study in advanced bowel and stomach cancers saw every patient's cancer keep growing.
A measured position a patient can take to their oncologist: the drug is being tested properly, and until those tests report, it is not a treatment.
The only completed efficacy study of an internet-famous dewormer in cancer patients found no benefit in anyone. It is the clearest human result in this whole story.
Useful as a map of the laboratory story; it contains no patient outcomes.
This is what legitimate repurposing looks like: a registered dose-finding trial that reports its toxicities. It says nothing yet about whether mebendazole helps glioblastoma.
This is the paper the online claims usually trace back to. It is a call for trials, not evidence that the drug works in people, and the trials it called for are still running.
Query for this technology: (TITLE:"Systematic drug repurposing" OR ABSTRACT:"Systematic drug repurposing") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma). Results are unfiltered search hits about Systematic drug repurposing, not a curated reading list.
Shares Paths to cures: interception, eradication, control, Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035, Colorectal cancer and the tag frontier.
Shares Paths to cures: interception, eradication, control, Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
Shares Paths to cures: interception, eradication, control, Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035, Exercise & lifestyle oncology and the tag frontier.
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
Open-source projects that implement or serve this technology, from OnCo's own catalogue: licence and last activity as the repository reported them on the day of the fetch. Listing is not endorsement; check the licence before reuse and the validation before clinical use.
A deep learning toolkit for drug-target interaction and repurposing.
The Drug Gene Interaction Database aggregates druggable genes and drug-gene interactions from many sources with an open API.