Aspirin Boosts Cancer Immunotherapy: Study

Giving cheap aspirin to cancer patients may turbo-charge the effectiveness of expensive new medicines that help their immune systems fight tumors, experiments on mice suggest.

Immunotherapy promises to revolutionize cancer care by offering a better, longer-lasting response with fewer adverse side effects than conventional treatment, but the new drugs do not work well in all cases.

One reason is that cancer cells often produce large amounts of the molecule prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), which turns down the immune system's normal attack response to tumor cells, according to scientists at London's new Francis Crick Institute.

Aspirin blocks PGE2 production and the researchers found that adding it to an immunotherapy treatment called anti-PD-1 substantially slowed the growth of bowel and melanoma cancers in mice when compared with treatment by immunotherapy alone.

There is already some evidence that the findings in mice will apply to human tissue but there is still a long way to go before this is proven.

Still, the research adds to aspirin's reputation as a "wonder drug."

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