14 DAY TRIAL // Tricyclic antidepressants have been around since the 1950s. They are primarily used to address conditions like major depressive disorder, but doctors sometimes also prescribe them to people diagnosed with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder. They can also help manage chronic pain.
Now, a team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology seem to have found yet another use for them. In a report published in the journal Cancer Cell this past Thursday, September 24, they show tricyclic antidepressants can help limit the growth of glioblastomas, i.e. cancerous tumors in the brain.
The drugs make cancer cells self-destruct
In was in the early 2000s that scientists first noticed that tricyclic antidepressants could increase tumor autophagy, meaning they could make cancer cells self-destruct at a rapid pace. However, such promising results were only obtained in laboratory tests.
When medical experts tried to replicate them in a clinical trial, the drugs failed to do what was expected of them. Plainly put, they showed no effect as a treatment for cancer.
As part of their investigation, however, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology team did not use tricyclic antidepressants alone. Rather they combined them with blood thinners, also known to cause cancer cells to self-destruct. Apparently, this did the trick.
The scientists say that, having administered this combo of antidepressants and blood thinners to lab mice with tumors developing in their brains, they found the rodents lived longer.
More precisely, the antidepressants and the blood thinners worked together to double the lifespan of the mice the researchers experimented on. When administered alone, neither the antidepressants nor the blood thinners had any effect on tumor development.
A potential new treatment for brain tumors
True, the rodents were not cured. All the same, the fact that the tumors in their brain took more time to grow and so they lived much longer than they were expected to is quite impressive.
“It is exciting to envision that combining two relatively inexpensive and non-toxic classes of generic drugs holds promise to make a difference in the treatment of patients with lethal brain cancer,” study senior study author Douglas Hanahan explained in a statement.
All the same, the research team say further studies are needed before even considering administering the same combination of antidepressants and blood thinners to human patients, Science Daily tells us.
“This new mechanism-based strategy to therapeutically target glioblastoma is provocative, but at an early stage of evaluation, and will require considerable follow-up to assess its potential,” said researcher Douglas Hanahan.