Some antibiotics appear to work as agents for treating skin cancer in the form of melanoma. This emerges from a new study conducted by researchers from Belgium. They examined the effects of some antibiotic drugs on patient-derived tumors in mice. In addition, scientists have found a potential new weapon against melanoma in the form of antibiotics that target cancer cells.
Effectiveness of antibiotics in the treatment of skin cancer
The active ingredients studied by the research team exploit a vulnerability that arises in tumor cells when they try to survive cancer therapy. As melanoma develops, some mutated cells may escape skin cancer treatment and stop proliferating to trick the immune system. These are the cancer cells that have the potential to form a new tumor mass at a later date, according to cancer researchers. However, to survive cancer treatment, these inactive cells must keep their powerhouses, the mitochondria, on constantly. Because mitochondria descend from bacteria that began living in cells over time, they are highly susceptible to a certain class of antibiotics. This gave the study authors the idea of using these antibiotics as anti-melanoma agents. They implanted human tumors into laboratory mice, which they then treated with antibiotics. This was done either as a sole therapy or in combination with existing anti-melanoma therapies.
The antibiotics quickly killed many cancer cells and were thus able to buy the valuable time that immunotherapy would need. The researchers worked with drugs that are currently useddue to increasing antibiotic resistanceare only rarely effective against bacterial infections. However, this resistance did not affect the effectiveness of the skin cancer treatment in this study, the authors said. The treated cancer cells showed high sensitivity to these antibiotics and were therefore able to be repurposed by the team. However, the results are based on experiments in mice, so researchers don't know how effective this treatment would be in humans.This studymentions only one human case in which a melanoma patient received antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection. This resulted in a re-sensitization of a resistant lesion to standard therapies.
