Ivermectin, a potential anticancer drug derived from an antiparasitic drug

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7505114/

Cancer stem cells

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a cell population similar to stem cells with characteristics of self-renewal and differentiation potential in tumor tissue [89,90]. Although CSCs are similar to stem cells in terms of function, because of the lack of a negative feedback regulation mechanism for stem cell self-renewal, their powerful proliferation and multidirectional differentiation abilities are unrestricted, which allows CSCs to maintain certain activities during chemotherapy and radiotherapy [[90], [91], [92]]. When the external environment is suitable, CSCs will rapidly proliferate to reactivate the formation and growth of tumors. Therefore, CSCs have been widely recognized as the main cause of recurrence after treatment [93,94]. Guadalupe evaluated the effect of IVM on CSCs in the breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231 [95]. The experimental results showed that IVM would preferentially targeted and inhibited CSCs-rich cell populations compared with other cell populations in MDA-MB-231 cells. Moreover, the expression of the homeobox protein NANOG, octamer-binding protein 4 (OCT-4) and SRY-box 2 (SOX-2), which are closely related to the self-renewal and differentiation ability of stem cells in CSCs, were also significantly inhibited by IVM. This suggests that IVM may be used as a potential CSCs inhibitor for cancer therapy. Further studies showed that IVM could inhibit CSCs by regulating the PAK1-STAT3 axis [96].

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