Medicine Heart drug protects against metastases in breast cancer according to study

An old heart medication could protect breast cancer patients from metastases in the future. A Swiss research team has discovered that the active ingredient digoxin dissolves clumps of circulating breast cancer cells in the blood and thus reduces the risk of metastasis.

The scientific journal "Nature Medicine" published evidence to this effect on Friday. In a clinical study, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and the University Hospitals of Zurich and Basel administered a low dose of digoxin to nine patients with disseminated breast cancer for a week.

The cancer cell clumps in the blood, known as circulating tumor cell clusters (CTC clusters), became smaller as a result. On average, the number of cells per cluster decreased by 2.2 cells.

In view of the typical cluster size of just a handful of cells, this could mean a significant reduction in the risk of metastasis, ETH Zurich wrote in a press release on the study. This is because the smaller the clusters, the less likely they are to successfully give rise to metastases.

Further developments needed

"This study should be seen as proof-of-concept that it is possible to disrupt CTC clusters," said study leader Nicola Aceto from ETH Zurich when asked by the news agency Keystone-SDA. In order to test whether this approach really leads to the prevention of metastases, more effective and easier to dose drugs must first be developed, according to the researcher.

The substance originally found in the foxglove was the first effective drug used to treat chronic cardiac insufficiency since around 1930. However, there are now more effective and better tolerated drugs for the treatment of chronic heart failure.

The fact that digoxin could also be effective in connection with breast cancer was discovered by the scientists around five years ago, as the ETH explained in the press release. They carried out an extensive screening in which they systematically tested more than 2,400 different substances in cell cultures in order to find active substances against clusters of circulating tumor cells.

SDA