UT Health San Antonio researchers are encouraged by some initial successes in repurposing a safe, decades-old, FDA-approved antidepressant drug to help in the battle against one of the toughest of cancers, breast cancer.The Mays Cancer Center at UT Health San Antonio — South Texas’ only National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center — is putting a decades-old antidepressant drug to new use treating breast cancers that don’t respond to existing therapies.
Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again. By reducing signaling of the hormone estrogen, imipramine stunts the growth of estrogen receptor-positive breast cancers.This solid foundation of knowledge set the table for the clinical trial directed by Virginia Kaklamani, MD, leader of the Breast Cancer Program at the Mays Cancer Center and professor of medicine in the Long School of Medicine. The clinical team gave imipramine to women newly diagnosed with breast cancer who awaited surgery.
This small pilot study, funded by the Mays Cancer Center, is a preliminary experiment to show that imipramine is an active drug in breast cancer, Kaklamani said.