Repurposing old drugs for a new life：metformin shows promising in cancer care / 中国生化药物杂志

ABSTRACT

Development of small molecule drugs is important for targeted and personalized therapy for cancers.However,it is staggering to take new compounds from the research bench to clinical trial pipelines and eventually to the clinical practice,due to the time,effort and costs.Most drugs need five years of development after discovery in the laboratory before they are ready to be tested for efficacy and safety.Compared to development of new drugs from scratch, increasing research efforts have been made to turn existing drugs to new uses to treat cancers, which may bypass years of costly work.Metformin used in cancer care is a good example of giving old drugs a new life.The activity of metformin on anti-cancer has recently drawn significant attention.Epidemiological and experimental studies have shown that metformin can cut down the incidence of cancer in diabetic patients and reduce metabolism-related cancers.Meanwhile, recent study has found metformin can induce autophagy of esophageal cancer cells by inhibiting inflammatory signaling pathway.In recent years, increasing studies have shown that metformin plays a major role in suppressing cancers via multiple mechanisms.In this mini-review,we summarize the updates of the research on metformin in cancer prevention and treatment.