A low-cost drug used for treating colds can prevent bladder cancer from spreading, as well as reduce resistance to anti-cancer drugs, a new study has found. Bladder cancer is the seventh most common cancer in males worldwide, researchers said.
It can be grouped into two types: non-muscle-invasive cancers, which have a five-year survival rate of 90 per cent, and muscle-invasive cancers, which have poor prognoses.
The latter are normally treated with anticancer drugs such as cisplatin, but tend to become chemoresistant and spread to organs such as the lungs and liver, as well as bone. Researchers at the Hokkaido University in Japan, inoculated human bladder cancer cells labelled with luciferase into mice, creating a xenograft bladder cancer model. The primary bladder xenograft gradually grew and, after 45 days, metastatic tumours were detected in the lungs, liver and bone.
