Drug commonly used as antidepressant helps fight cancer in mice

A class of drug called monoamine oxidase inhibitors is commonly prescribed to treat depression; the medications work by boosting levels of serotonin, the brain ’s “happiness hormone.”A new study by UCLA researchers suggests that those drugs, commonly known as MAOIs, might have another health benefit: helping the immune system attack cancer. Their findings are reported in two papers, which are published in the journals Science Immunology and Nature Communications.“MAOIs had not been linked to the immune system’s response to cancer before,” saidLili Yang, senior author of the study and a member of the  Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA. “What’s especially exciting is that this is a very well-studied and safe class of drug, so repurposing it for cancer isn’t as challenging as developing a completely new drug would be.”Recent advances in understanding how the human immune system naturally seeks out and destroys cancer cells, as well as how tumors try to evade that response, has led to new cancer immunotherapies — drugs that boost the immune system’s activity to try to fight cancer.In an effort to develop new cancer immunotherapies, Yang and her colleagues compared immune cells from melanoma tumors in mice to immune cells from cancer-free animals. Immune cells that had infiltrated tumors had much higher activity of a gene called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA. MAOA ’s corresponding protein, called MAO-A, c...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news