A team led by ETH molecular biologist Berend Snijder has found an active substance that effectively combats glioblastomas, at least in the laboratory. Vortioxetine and related substances.
The antidepressant has been approved in Switzerland since 2016. It can pass through the blood-brain barrier – a requirement that cancer drugs often fail to meet.
In Zurich, tests of antidepressants, drugs for Parkinson’s disease and antipsychotics showed that some of the antidepressants were surprisingly effective against the tumor cells – especially vortioxetine. The drug also showed good effectiveness in tests on mice with glioblastoma, especially in combination with the current standard treatment.
“The advantage of vortioxetine is that it is already approved and very cost-effective,” says Michael Weller, director of the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Zurich; he was co-author of the study.
The drug could one day complement standard therapy. It would then be the first time in decades that an active ingredient has been found that would take the treatment of glioblastoma a big step forward.
130 products tested
ETH postdoctoral researcher Sohyon Lee came to this new insight together with Tobias Weiss, senior physician at the Department of Neurology at USZ – thanks to the pharmacoscopy screening platform that researchers at ETH Zurich have developed over the past ten years.
In their study, Soyhon Lee, Tobias Weiss and colleagues focused primarily on neuroactive substances that pass through the blood-brain barrier. In total, they tested more than 130 different agents on tumor tissue from 40 patients who had recently undergone surgery at the University Hospital of Zurich. At the same time, they used a computer model to test over a million substances for their effectiveness against glioblastomas.
Now a group from ETH and USZ is preparing clinical trials on the use of vortioxetine to treat glioblastomas.
Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor. In Switzerland, three out of 100,000 people develop a glioblastoma every year; men are affected more often than women. Treatment involves surgical removal of the tumor mass, radiation and chemotherapy. A cure is currently not possible. The average survival time is around 15 months with today’s treatment methods.
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