Skin Cancer Drug HA15 Has Been Developed

With the coming of summer, a team of researchers from the Mediterranean Center for Molecular Medicine (C3M) has developed new drugs for melanoma, a highly aggressive form of skin cancer. Their drug, the HA15, reduces the viability of melanoma cells without posing a toxic threat to normal cells.

Melanocytes, or cells creating melanin, the color pigment, get affected by melanoma. Tumor progresses in three stages---radial growth, vertical growth and the final metastatic stage.

Currently, people are aware of the effect of the sun on the skin and the development of cancer. "My general sense is that people are much more savvy about sun exposure," said Colette Pameijer, a surgical oncologist from the Penn State Melanoma and Skin Cancer Center who wasn't involved in the study.

With research, some positive results have been found to treat the metastatic stage, with therapies and immunotherapies. Still, patients need more treatments to reduce tumor growth and avoid the development of more metastases. It is important to find new drug candidates to treat skin care, so that new biotherapies can fight melanoma, even as cancer doubles in every decade.

The team from C3M identified a new family of drugs called the thiazole benzensulfonamides (TZB), which showed anticancer properties.

"Initially this family of drugs was identified in type 2 diabetes, as it increased the sensitivity of cells to insulin," said Stéphane Rocchi of C3M and senior author of the study. "If we wanted to use it against cancer, we had to be able to eliminate this proinsulin activity. Thus we started to modify its structure."

The team finally changed the initial TZB structure by collaborating with researchers from the Nice Institute of Chemistry. The final formulation too contains HA15 as a "lead compound."

The findings were published online May 26 in Cancer Cell.