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Metformin: Metformin & Cancer

April 7, 2012 by · Comments Off on Metformin: Metformin & Cancer 

Metformin: Metformin & Cancer, Does hope for cancer treatment lie in new drugs? Not necessarily, as new research shows that a commonly prescribed diabetes drug, metformin, may help fight cancer. The drug helps diabetes patients keep their blood sugar in check and makes them more sensitive to insulin. But several new studies examined the effect of metformin on cancerous tumors, based on previous findings that metformin increases the activity of an enzyme involved in tumor suppression.

The latest findings were presented this month in the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Chicago.

Researchers studied the effect of metformin on patients affected with a variety of cancers, including melanoma, pancreatic, lung, and prostate cancer. The studies found metformin inhibits the growth of most tumor cells.

Pancreatic patients prescribed metformin had a 32 percent reduced risk for death compared to those not prescribed the drug, according to a study led by Dr. Dongui Li, professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Li and colleagues observed 302 patients with diabetes and pancreatic cancer- 117 of the patients were prescribed metformin.

Another study of melanoma patients, led by researchers at the Institute for Cancer Research in London, found that metformin alone contributed to the growth of cancerous tumors in mice – but when combined with other inhibitors, axitinib and bevacizumab, tumor growth was suppressed by up to 64 percent.

“Our results were surprising because combining metformin and vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A) inhibitors was much more effective at blocking tumor growth than would be expected given the effect of either drug on its own,” Dr. Richard Marais, professor of molecular oncology at The Paterson Institute for Cancer Research in Manchester, England, said in a written statement.

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