Scientists accidentally discover how old blood pressure drug could fight cancer

Scientists are studying an existing one Blood pressure medication A researcher named Hydralazine accidentally discovered that it could potentially fight cancer.

Hydralazine has been used to treat high blood pressure since the 1950s, but exactly how it works was unclear.

“It comes from a ‘pre-target’ era of drug development, when researchers first relied on what they saw in patients and only later tried to explain the biology behind it,” Kyosuke Shishikura, a doctor and scientist at the University of Pennsylvania involved in the study, said in a university news release.

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Shishikura and a broader research team discovered that hydralazine directly targets a small but crucial enzyme called 2-aminoethanethiol dioxygenase (ADO).

This enzyme acts like a cellular oxygen sensor and helps cells survive when oxygen levels are low. This can help prevent fast-growing tumors such as glioblastoma, an aggressive form of Brain cancer that resists treatment and almost always comes back.

In fast-growing cancers like glioblastoma, the tumor cells multiply so quickly that their blood supply cannot keep up. This means that parts of the tumor do not receive enough oxygen.

However, typical cells die in oxygen-deficient environments Tumor cells Turn on special survival systems that will help them continue to divide even when there is a lack of oxygen. Studies show that one of these systems includes the ADO enzyme.

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“ADO is like an alarm bell that rings the moment oxygen begins to decline,” explained Megan Matthews, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Penn University and a researcher on the study, in the same press release.

The team used several advanced techniques—including X-ray crystallography, which analyzes the structure of molecules—to determine how hydralazine binds to ADO.

They found that hydralazine silences this alarm by binding to ADO and causing it to stop working. This shuts down the cell’s oxygen response system – and in the case of Cancer cellsforces them to stop dividing.

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To test this discovery, the team treated human glioblastoma cells with hydralazine in the laboratory. After three days, they noticed that the cells stopped reproducing and became larger and flatter. The cells entered a kind of permanent “sleep mode” known as “senescence,” the researchers noted.

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The drug didn’t kill the cells completely, but it took away their ability to grow and spread.

This is a major advance in controlling cancers such as glioblastoma, which are extremely difficult to treat and often recur afterwards Surgery and chemotherapyaccording to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Because hydralazine is already approved by the FDA, researchers hope it can be used for other purposes Cancer therapy much faster than a brand new drug.

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So far, the experiments have only been carried out on cell cultures, not on animals or humans, the researchers noted. The next step will be to test whether ADO can be safely and effectively blocked in living systems.

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The press release emphasizes that the discovery is only a starting point for drug repurposing and is not yet a clinical treatment.

As Matthews said, “Understanding how hydralazine works at the molecular level provides a path to safer and more selective treatments.”