Today, cancer is one of the most severe and extremely difficult to treat conditions. Despite the development and research in the field of targeted drug delivery and the creation of microbots, the most effective and clinically proven methods are surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. But, according to the editors of eLife magazine, a team of scientists from the University of Colorado has been able to cure cancer with malaria medicine.
Specialists at the University of Colorado were able to significantly reduce the size of the patient's brain tumor, after which the doctors were able to operate on the girl. The tumor did not respond to traditional chemotherapy drugs, and surgery was impossible due to the extremely large size of the tumor. According to doctors, if not for the experimental treatment, the girl would have lasted no more than a year.
It is worth saying that the choice of antimalarial drug did not take place "from the ceiling." The fact is that the selected drug, the main active ingredient of which is chloroquine phosphate, has an extremely interesting property: it inhibits the process of autophagy, which consists in self-renewal of cells by utilizing their components. It is because of autophagy that many tumors are extremely resistant to treatment. And it is logical that with the acceleration of this process, the tumor will quickly disintegrate, which happened in this case. After the use of chloroquine phosphate, chemotherapy drugs began to successfully affect the tumor. It should be noted that two more patients received similar treatment. There was also a positive trend in their condition.
VLADIMIR KUZNETSOV