Page 36 Daily Mail, Tuesday, July 30, 2019
A
S A GP, Lisa McGrath had
always considered herself
healthy, but then, at 42, she
found a lump in her breast, and
was diagnosed with advancedbreast cancer.
It was, as Lisa recalls seven years later, a
complete shock. ‘I have never smoked and
hardly drink,’ she says. ‘I run regularly and the
most overweight I’ve ever been is by 7-10lb. I
have had four babies, all breastfed, and I have
no family history of breast cancer.’
The cancer had spread into her left armpit
and into most of the lymph nodes. ‘It had grown
in a sheet rather than a tight ball — a type of
tumour that’s harder to detect and is often
bigger when it’s found,’ she says.
After a mastectomy, Lisa underwent six cycles
of chemotherapy and 25 sessions of radiother-
apy. At the time, her eldest son, Patrick, was 22,
her next son, Euan, was 11, and her daughters,
Sophie and Emily, were just ten and six.
‘The chemotherapy made me terribly ill,’ she
recalls. ‘I felt very sick and had severe pain in
my hands and feet and terrible headaches. I
was exhausted and I lost all my hair, eyelashes
and eyebrows.’
Although the treatment — which kills off the
cancer cells — cleared the disease, six years
later, in spring 2018, Lisa was told it had
returned, and was now in six sites in the bones
of her legs, pelvis, spine and ribs.
It’s a story unfortunately familiar to far too
many patients. But what is unusual is what
happened next. As Lisa is a GP, she has a better
understanding of the mechanisms of cancer
than many people.
She used this to research other options, which
she believes, in conjunction with her mainstream
treatment, have helped her not only keep the
cancer at bay, but even achieve a small amount
of tumour shrinkage.
DIABETES PILL SEEMS TO
HALT TUMOUR GROWTH
CEnTrAL to this is metformin, a drug used for
almost a century not for cancer, but as a safe
and routine treatment for type 2 diabetes.
In diabetes it is used to stop the overproduc-
tion of glucose in the liver. In cancer treatment,
the precise mechanism is unclear, but
metformin seems to block the supply of glucose
that cancer cells need to grow and multiply; it
also blocks the activity of enzymes used for
cancer cell growth.
According to the American national Center
for Biotechnology Information, a government
body, there have been almost 4,500 studies
since the early Eighties investigating using
metformin as an additional drug in the
treatment of cancer.
Only last month, a study in the journal
Carcinogenesis showed metformin combined
with a class of anti-cancer drugs called CtBP
inhibitors reduced breast cancer cell growth by
That’s the intriguing question raised by
patients who swear they work. But profit
hungry big pharma is ignoring them...
By LOIS
ROGERS
Could cheap
drugs (up to a
century old) be
the new way to
tackle cancer?
up to 76 per cent.
However, the study’s lead author,
Dr Jeremy Blaydes, a cancer cell
biologist from the University of
Southampton, cautioned: ‘More
work is still needed — we need the
outcomes of more studies before
we can think about recruiting
patients into large human trials.’
This was reiterated by Breast
Cancer now, the charity that
funded this study. ‘There is not
enough evidence to show met-
formin works,’ a spokesman said.
This reflects the mainstream
view, which is why the drug is
rarely recommended by cancer
specialists and is not available for
cancer treatment on the nHS.
Indeed, Lisa has experienced this
in her own GP practice. ‘Metformin
hasn’t been suggested as an addi-
tional treatment for any of my own
patients,’ says Lisa, whose surgery
is on the Wirral in Merseyside,
where she lives with her husband,
Conor, a consultant anaesthetist.
‘As a GP you aren’t allowed to
recommend it — if patients asked
about metformin, I could tell them
to ask their oncologist about it, or
say I believe it has a benefit, but
that’s all.’ And yet she firmly
believes that, in her case, the drug
has been key and is convinced that
the reason it’s not being used more
widely is because it’s not in drug
companies’ financial interests to
investigate or promote its use.
After her initial diagnosis and
successful treatment, Lisareturned to three days a week at
work as a GP and got on with life.
‘As far as my doctors were con-
cerned, after the treatment there
was nothing further to see,’ she
says. ‘I had all the treatment I
could. Then, in February last year,
I was out running with friends, anda couple of times I noticed I was
getting pains in my hips.
‘I was only doing 5km to 10 km,
not crazy distances, but I thought
I had better ease off and the hip
pain settled down. Then, in April, I
had back pain which was new, and
the hip pain had come back. I toldmyself it was wear and tear, but it
was beginning to get quite
frightening and in June last year I
contacted my oncologist at
Clatterbridge Hospital, Birken-
head. I knew in my heart that the
cancer had spread to my bones.’
When scans confirmed this, LisaDEVELOPING a new cancer drug can take ten
years — and when they come through they
can be prohibitively expensive. The drug
pembrolizumab, for melanoma and lung
cancer, for example, costs £100,000 a year.
However, using existing medication means
the treatment is potentially available much
quicker — and often far cheaper. Also,
because doctors already have information
about their long-term use, they will bring
fewer risks.
Imperial College London has been using
algorithms to sift through the anti-cancer
potential of 1,500 existing drugs and 8,000everyday foods. The researchers have
already found ‘several compounds not con-
ventionally used as a cancer treatment that
demonstrated high anti-cancer likeness,’
according to their latest findings published
this month in Scientific Reports.
They found that tea, carrot, celery, orange,
grape, coriander, cabbage and dill con-
tained a high number of molecules ‘with
high anti-cancer likeness.’
Among the drugs identified so far as having
anti-cancer potential are metformin as well
as the antibiotic rosoxacin and the anti-
fungal clinoquinol. However, the researchersstress that more work is needed to confirm
these initial results.
Other existing drugs have already been
re-purposed for cancer treatment,
including thalidomide. First marketed in
1957 as a sedative, it was also controver-
sially given to women to help with morning
sickness, although this ceased after it
caused birth defects.
In recent years, it has been re-purposed
as a cancer drug, as it can stop the develop-
ment of new blood vessels the cancer needs
to survive. It is now the first-line treatment
for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.FAMILIAR MEDICINES THAT MAY PROVE EFFECTIVE