Gillies McIndoe: Drug repurposing research gains national attention

Gillies McIndoe PhD student Freya Weth's research on drug repurposing for cancer therapy recently featured in The Listener article "Old drugs, new tricks: From aspirin to statins - how repurposed meds can help fight cancers." Her comprehensive review, published in the British Journal of Cancer, addresses the critical challenges in modern oncology: high failure rates, exorbitant costs, the timeline of new drug discovery that can take 13-15 years and billions of dollars to bring treatments to patients.

Cancer presents unique therapeutic challenges due to its diverse biological characteristics and complex cellular networks. Traditional single-drug approaches often prove inadequate against these sophisticated diseases, which can adapt and resist treatment through multiple pathways. Freya's research explores how repurposing existing medications with proven safety records can enable innovative combination strategies that simultaneously target different aspects of cancer biology, potentially overcoming the limitations of conventional monotherapy approaches.

Her review systematically examines current repurposing methodologies while identifying key barriers that have hindered progress in this field, including commercial incentives, technical limitations, and regulatory frameworks. By leveraging medications already approved for other conditions, researchers can bypass many of the traditional hurdles in drug development. This strategy not only accelerates treatment availability but also enhances global access to effective cancer therapies, addressing healthcare disparities that prevent many patients from accessing cutting-edge treatments.

“My research has found that when certain safe, well-known, and already-approved drugs are combined at specific doses and ratios, the synergistic effect achieved exceeds what would be expected. This fascinating phenomenon offers a promising strategy for tackling cancer. Complex combination testing in the lab with advanced patient-derived models to discover synergy allows for lower doses, less toxicity, and better outcomes; this approach can improve clinical trial success rates and move toward making cancer treatment more accessible and affordable,” says Freya.

Read the research >>

The Listener article also mentioned Gillies McIndoe's Founder, Dr Swee Tan's Glioblastoma clinical trials. Dr Tan initially focused on repurposed drugs to treat strawberry birthmarks. In 2022, Dr Tan was featured in The Listener discussing his phase I clinical trial using repurposed drugs to treat patients with glioblastoma, the most aggressive primary brain tumour in adults, with a median overall survival of approximately 12 months. Following results from the phase I clinical trial, he is recruiting 75 patients for the phase II clinical trial in collaboration with neurosurgeons and oncologists. Nineteen patients from across New Zealand have enrolled so far.