The Wu Yijun research team of the Institute of Zoology found that ivermectin can be used to fight tumor metastasis

Cancer is one of the important diseases that endanger public health, and its morbidity and mortality rate are increasing
year by year.
However, the most difficult problem in cancer treatment is how to deal with the metastasis of cancer cells, once tumor metastasis occurs, the treatment effect is often difficult to predict, and patients suffer greatly as a result
.
There is an urgent need to develop drugs to combat tumor metastasis, but unfortunately, no such drugs have been used in the clinic
so far.
Through a series of in vivo and in vitro experiments, the molecular toxicology research group of the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that ivermectin, a derivative of the macrolide chemical abamectin, used as a broad-spectrum insecticide, can significantly combat the metastasis
of tumor cells 。 The research team utilized a variety of tumor cell lines (human colorectal cancer cell lines; Human breast cancer cell lines, etc.
) and different animal models (e.
g.
, NOD/SCID mouse subcutaneous tumor model, tail vein injection of cancer cells caused metastases, etc.
) revealed that ivermectin can not only increase the sensitivity of tumor cells to chemotherapy drugs, but especially effectively reverse the tolerance of drug-resistant tumor cells to commonly used chemotherapy drugs, the relevant results were published in the Journal of Experimental and Clinical Cancer Research (J Exp Clin Cancer Res, 2019, 38:265).

。 Further studies have found that ivermectin can also fight tumor metastasis, and it has been proved by experimental oncology, cell biology and molecular biology that the mechanism of action of ivermectin against tumor metastasis is mainly to regulate the expression level of migration-related proteins by inhibiting the activation of Wnt/β-catenin/integrin β1/FAK signaling pathway and its downstream signals to achieve inhibition of cancer cell metastasis (Figure 1).

The above results show that ivermectin can not only enhance the therapeutic effect of chemotherapy drugs on tumors and reverse the tolerance of drug-resistant tumor cells to chemotherapy drugs, but also inhibit the metastasis
of cancer cells in vivo.
Therefore, this FDA-approved antiparasitic drug ivermectin is expected to be used as a clinical treatment for anti-tumor metastasis
.
The study, titled "Ivermectin inhibits cancer cell metastasis by regulating the Wnt/β-catenin/integrin β1/FAK signaling pathway," was published online on October 15, 2022 in the latest issue of the American Journal of Cancer Research (Am J Cancer Res, 2022, 12: 4502-4519）
。 Jiang Lu, a doctoral student from the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the first author of the paper, and researcher Wu Yijun of the Molecular Toxicology Research Group is the associate author
of the paper.

Article link address: https://e-century.
us/files/ajcr/12/10/ajcr0143971.
pdf

Fig.
1 Schematic diagram of the mechanism of action of ivermectin against cancer cell metastasis