Aspirin shows promise in the fight against breast cancer, but researchers are having trouble getting funding for a clinical trial.
We have news tonight about treating breast cancer a harvard professor wants the world to know about a low-cost drug that she believes could save lives the problem is she can’t find funding for a study medical sciences correspondent kelly crowe explains why aspirin has been relieving pain for over 100 years but could it have cancer fighting potential maybe according
To a study of women being treated for breast cancer who also took aspirin we were kind of amazed to find that among those women who were taking aspirin for other reasons they have a 50% lower risk of dying of their breast cancer than the women who weren’t taking aspirin a dramatic finding but the only way to prove it is through an expensive clinical trial and who
Will pay not major drug companies because aspirin is cheap and patent free and there’s no chance of profit and the researchers have already been turned down for government funding my colleagues and i are a little frustrated that we haven’t been able to convince anyone to fund this so michelle holmes wrote this op-ed column in the new york times describing the
Dilemma aspirin a potential cancer treatment sitting idle in the medicine cabinet for lack of interest that prompted an angry response from a former head of research for pfizer one of the world’s largest drug companies john lamb at tina’s point that the industry is busy chasing new discoveries all sorts of new knowledge is bursting on the scene on a daily basis with
The unraveling of the human genome project and the number of targets far and and a potential 8 is far outstrip the monies we have right now and he says drug companies would not be able to make money from aspirin if you invested in aspirin and and and showed that it worked that’s fine but but you would have no return on something that would cause some millions of
Dollars to do yet most new therapies come from industry because governments are not in the drug development business the problem is is that we’ve depended on that too that mechanism to get new treatments which doesn’t allow any room for reexamining old treatments medical sciences correspondent kelly crowe is with us now kelly are there other kinds of cancer that
Researchers think might benefit from aspirin as well yes there are it looks like there may be some evidence to suggest it might be effective in stomach cancer colon cancer pancreatic cancer as well as breast cancer now a clinical trial is just getting underway in britain right now a group has come up with some funding from a charity and they’re about to start that
Trial although the the harvard researchers say that’s going to take about a decade to get results and they argue that if we were looking at breast cancer alone we could have the answer in about half that time if they could find the money you raise important questions here are there other staples in our medicine cabinet that could also be effective for other things
It looks like it there there’s interest in beta blockers in some diabetic medications and other common generic drugs and in every one of these cases the researchers same face the same problem how to find funding for expensive clinical trials outside of the traditional drug discovery process thank you so much kelly thank you
Transcribed from video
Can Aspirin treat breast cancer? By CBC News The National
