The Next Cancer Treatments Could Come From Old Drugs
At a time when drugs can take a decade from discovery to market, and as Big Pharma develops fewer drugs, a growing number of researchers are betting on old drugs.
It costs $475,000 per patient to treat childhood leukemia with the cutting-edge therapy Kymriah. But what if a cancer drug could be had for pennies a day because it already existed?
That’s exactly what happened when French doctors used a decades-old blood pressure medication on a child with a benign tumor. The drug, called propranolol, lowered blood pressure but also shrank the tumor. In subsequent
