Anti-Fungal Drug May Help Treat Cancer

A drug that has been used for 40 years for the treatment of skin fungus has been found to be a possible cancer treatment, according to an international team of scientists. Leslie Wilson, professor of biochemistry and pharmacology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that the antifungal drug, griseofulvin, has been shown to inhibit the growth of cancer cells in his laboratory. The results are published in today's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work is the result of a collaboration between Wilson's lab, in UCSB's Department of Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and a lab in the School of Biosciences and Bioengineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in India.