Regularly Taking This Common Pain Reliever May Reduce the Spread of Cancers, Study Finds
"There’s a therapeutic window of opportunity when cancer cells are particularly vulnerable to immune attack."
Check most medicine cabinets in America, and you’ll likely find pain relievers like aspirin and ibuprofen. Although these medications are generally used for minor aches and pains, new research suggests aspirin may have an additional benefit to those with specific types of cancer: It can slow its spread.
The research, published in Nature, looked at how preventative measures in the early stages of cancer may be able to reduce the risk of metastasis—the spread of cancer cells from their original site to other parts of the body.
“Most immunotherapies are developed to treat patients with established metastatic cancer, but when cancer first spreads, there’s a unique therapeutic window of opportunity when cancer cells are particularly vulnerable to immune attack," head researcher Rahul Roychoudhuri said in a statement. "We hope that therapies that target this window of vulnerability will have tremendous scope in preventing recurrence in patients with early cancer at risk of recurrence.”
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According to the study, when a single cancer cell breaks off from its original host, an integral part of our immune defense—a white blood cell known as a T cell—works to eradicate it. However, another element of our blood, known as platelets, suppress these cells and make it more difficult for them to fight off cancer.
With the help of aspirin, which is commonly used to reduce the risk of clotting by inhibiting the action of platelets, the T cells are able to pursue the loose cancer cells.
"It was a Eureka moment when we found TXA2 was the molecular signal that activates this suppressive effect on T cells," said study author Dr. Jie Yang from the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge. "Before this, we had not been aware of the implication of our findings in understanding the anti-metastatic activity of aspirin. It was an entirely unexpected finding, which sent us down quite a different path of enquiry than we had anticipated.”
While more research is needed to know if aspirin can be widely used to prevent the spread of certain types of cancer, it would definitely be a more accessible option.
“Aspirin, or other drugs that could target this pathway, have the potential to be less expensive than antibody-based therapies, and therefore more accessible globally," Yang adds.
