Antidepressants could be successful treatment for deadly lung cancer

Lung cancer could be effectively treated by a little-used form of antidepressant medication, according to a new study. Research performed by the Stanford School of Medicine, US, suggests that small-cell lung cancer and other particularly deadly forms of the disease could be treated with an antidepressant class that is not widely used.

A clinical trial to test the findings of the study has already been set up, as the drug is already available for use in humans and, as such, already carries Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. A phase two trial is currently recruiting people suffering from certain forms of lung cancer in order to assess how effective the drug class is in the treatment of lung cancer. Researchers believe that it may also help to treat conditions such as aggressive gastrointestinal neuroendocrine cancers, as well as small-cell lung cancer.

Using a previously developed and approved drug for the treatment of a different condition or disease shows how medicine is being changed by genetic and biological databases. Research into different uses for existing treatments reduces cost and cuts down approval and trial time, meaning there is a chance that treatments reach patients quicker.

Doctor Atul Butte, division chief of systems medicine and director of the Center for Pediatric Bioinformatics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, said: "We are cutting down the decade or more and the $1 billion (£621 million) it can typically take to translate a laboratory finding into a successful drug treatment to about one to two years and spending about $100,000." 

Only about 15 per cent of lung cancers are small-cell, but this strand of the disease is incredibly deadly. Unfortunately no effective treatments for the disease have been developed in a number of years, meaning that survival rates are particularly low, according to Dr Julian Sage, senior author the study. The form of antidepressants were used as a treatment for laboratory-grown human and mouse cancer cells and the results were incredibly positive.