Could HIV Meds Help Slow Advanced Cancers?

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By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, April 7, 2022 (HealthDay News) — The introduction of HIV/AIDS, halting disease progression and dramatically extending lives.

Now, a small new study suggests another potential use for one of the standard HAART medications: It halted disease progression in about a quarter of patients who were battling advanced it appears likely that “>

Ting noted that HAART treatment for HIV patients — which is typically administered as a combination of several medications — targets specific proteins called “reverse transcriptases” (RT).

That’s because HIV needs RTs to replicate and spread.

“[But] we and others have previously found that RT proteins in human cells are reactivated in cancer,” explained Ting, also an associate professor of medicine with Harvard Medical School. “Therefore, these RT drugs for HIV [also] have the ability to block these human RTs found in cancer.”

To underscore that point, Ting highlighted a 2018 research paper that found that patients living with HIV while undergoing a three-drug “cocktail” of HAART therapy do, in fact, tend to have a significantly lower incidence of many types of cancer than the general population. That lower risk, researchers found, includes , prostateand colon cancer.

For the new study, Ting and his colleagues explored the potential of just one widely used HAART medication: before and after treatment,”>

The findings were published recently in the journal Cancer Discovery.

The progression-halting impact that the HAART med appeared to have on colon cancer suggests that “tumors behave in virus-like ways,” said study co-author Benjamin Greenbaum, an associate attending in the computational oncology service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

In fact, Greenbaum said, lamivudine’s impact on tumor cells is so similar to its impact on HIV that it amounts to a “surprising” form of “viral mimicry.”

Still, the majority of patients did not appear to reap any benefit. Ting suggested that in theory it might be because of differing amounts of RT proteins found in the cancer cells of individual patients.

“We are…trying to better understand which cancers are more dependent on this RT activity, so that we can have more precision in the patients that might benefit from this therapy,” he said, stressing that the prospects for this type of cancer intervention “are still in the early days.”

Even so, Dr. Andrew Chan — a professor in the department of medicine at Harvard Medical School and vice chair of gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital — said that the possibility of using HAART meds to treat advanced cancer would “represent a new target for treatment, which is really exciting, especially if we can repurpose existing drugs for other conditions for which we have a wealth of clinical experience.”

More information

There’s more on the connection between HIV and cancer risk at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

SOURCES: David Ting, MD, associate clinical director, innovation and director, Tumor Cartography Center, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and associate professor, medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston; Benjamin Greenbaum, PhD, associate attending, computational oncology service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City; Andrew Chan, MD, MPH, professor, department of medicine, Harvard Medical School and vice chair, gastroenterology, Massachusetts General Hospital; Cancer Discovery, March 23, 2022