A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has found that digoxin, a drug widely used to treat congestive heart failure, is an effective therapy for a rare and aggressive form of endometrial cancer. The findings , published in the July issue of the journal Gynecologic Oncology , were a surprise to the researchers, says Cheng-Han Lee, associate professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology and Sawin-Baldwin Chair in Ovarian Cancer. "People had begun to uncover the anti-cancer role of digoxin about a decade and a half ago," says Lee, who was senior author on the study.
"But they never figured out why it seemed to work on some cancers and not others, so it was difficult to translate the findings to clinical practice." The new U of A study, which was the master's thesis of graduate student Pooja Praveen Kumar, involved collaboration with scientists at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of British Columbia. The researchers used surgical tissue samples from patients with a highly aggressive type of endometrial cancer to create three-dimensional laboratory cell models that closely resembled how cancer cells would behave in humans.
They tested hundreds of drug compounds that might work to control the endometrial cancer cells, using a robotic platform at the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency. Digoxin was identified as a promising drug candidate, along with several other drugs in the cardiac glycoside compound family. The findings are critical because t.