T
he in silico approach to drug development just got a taste of validation, thanks to some intriguing new research from University of California, San Francisco. A drug cherry-picked with algorithms has behaved as expected: It’s helped shrink tumors in animal models.
The UCSF researchers have created a computational method to delve through enormous amounts of open-access data to find novel drugs — and also discover new ways to repurpose existing drugs. The work was just published in Nature Communications.
Interestingly, there is evidence that certain cancers may be caused by parasites, certain cancers by fungal infections, etc. Perhaps it is not surprising that anti-parasitics and anti-fungals would be effective in those cases.
Cancer is promoted by low hygiene yes, but it is more encouraged by the gene mutations.