Two Approved Cancer Drugs Fight HIV

Mansky, and two other UM colleagues, Christine Clouser, PhD, and Steven Patterson, PhD, began looking for FDA-approved drugs with lethal mutagenesis potential. They figured that finding approved drugs with clear safety data would speed up the research process and allow scientists to more quickly begin human testing of any drugs proved effective in the lab. Two such drugs, Gemzar (gemcitabine) and Dacogen (decitabine), seemed particularly promising.

The team found that when the two drugs were used together, at concentrations so low that neither drug was effective when used alone, the combination shut down HIV reproduction by 73 percent. Both drugs, like all other cancer chemotherapies, can have serious side effects when used at typical doses. Researchers hope that they can use doses low enough to minimize such side effects.