Antibiotics against melanoma
As melanoma develops, some cancer cells stop dividing to hide from the immune system. These cells can potentially form a new tumor mass at a later stage. However, in order to survive cancer treatment, these inactive cells must constantly keep their "accumulators" – mitochondria – turned on. Since mitochondria originated from bacteria that eventually began to live inside cells, they are very vulnerable to a certain class of antibiotics.
Researchers from the Catholic University of Leuven implanted melanoma fragments taken from patients into mice, which then received antibiotics either in the form of monotherapy or in combination with known antitumor drugs. Antibiotics quickly killed most of the cancer cells, which means they can buy valuable time before the start of immunotherapy. In tumors that no longer responded to targeted therapy, antibiotics prolonged the life, and in some cases even cured mice.
The researchers worked with tetracycline antibiotics, which are currently only rarely used for bacterial infections due to growing antibiotic resistance. However, this resistance does not affect the effectiveness of melanoma treatment in any way.
The results were obtained in mice, so patients with melanoma should not experiment on themselves, because it is still unknown how effective this treatment is in humans. The study mentions only one clinical case when a patient with melanoma received antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection, and this returned the sensitivity of cancer cells to standard anti-cancer therapy. This result gives grounds for optimism, but more research is needed, including clinical ones, to study the use of antibiotics for the treatment of patients with melanoma.
Article by R.Vendramin et al. Activation of the integrated stress response confers vulnerability to mitoribosome-targeting antibiotics in melanoma is published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
Aminat Adzhieva, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of KU Leuven: Antibiotics may help to treat melanoma.