HIV drugs can help slow down 'prostate cancer'

A new study has found that HIV drugs have the capacity to slow down the spread of prostate cancer.

Researchers have shown that the receptor CCR5, best known for its role in HIV therapy, may also be involved in driving the spread of prostate cancer to the bone.

Senior author on the study, Dr. Richard Pestell at Thomas Jefferson University said that since their work showed that they could dramatically reduce metastasis in pre-clinical models, and because the drug was already FDA approved for HIV treatment- they may be able to test soon whether this drug could block metastasis in patients with prostate cancer.

The researchers analyzed the genes of the metastasized bone and brain tumors and found genes driving the cancer were also involved in the CCR5 signaling pathway. To investigate further, the researchers administered the CCR5-blocking drug maraviroc to the new prostate cancer mouse model. In comparison to control animals, maraviroc dramatically reduced the overall metastatic load by 60 percent in the bone, brain and other organs.

Finally, in order to determine whether a similar mechanism might be at play in human prostate cancer, the researchers mined the genomic data of patients with prostate cancer and found that CCR5 was more highly expressed in prostate cancer tissue compared with normal tissue, and even more highly expressed in metastases compared with primary tumors.

Co-first author Xuanmao Jiao, Ph.D. said that they noticed that the patients who had a lower expression of the CCR5-pathway genes had a longer survival times, whereas high expression of these CCR5 genes was associated with a shorter overall survival.

The study is published online in the journal Cancer Research.