A Drug for Many Diseases? (Ivanhoe Exclusive)

By Stacie Overton, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Researchers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have developed a new drug that holds promise not just for Wilson's disease -- for which it was designed to treat -- but for many other diseases as well.

George Brewer, M.D., a hematologist from the University of Michigan, says the drug called tetrathiomolybdate helps Wilson's disease by controlling copper toxicity. In realizing how it worked in Wilson's disease, Dr. Brewer and his team thought TM held hope for other diseases as well. Ongoing studies are proving Dr. Brewer and his team right.

First, TM is being studied for its use in cancers. Dr. Brewer says: "It turns out that when you lower copper, you can inhibit a thing called angiogenesis, which is blood vessel growth. Cancer requires blood vessel growth in order to grow. We've done a lot of early work on TM as an anti-cancer agent. It is quite effective in animals, and we have a lot of human studies ongoing. It has been licensed to a company for commercial development for use in cancer." Currently, there are nine phase 2 cancer studies going on using TM.

Cancer is not the only disease it is benefiting. Dr. Brewer says: "TM inhibits angiogenesis by inhibiting chemical messengers called cytokines, and a lot of other diseases are a result of cytokine overaction. Diseases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and kidney diseases are all dependent on certain chemical messengers, cytokines, that overstimulate, overreact to injury, and cause too much scarring, too much fibrosis, and it occurred to us that that pathway might be inhibited by lowering copper. That has turned out to be true in animal studies. There has been some very nice animal work, which shows that we can reduce fibrotic damage from a variety of injuries both in the lung and in the liver with TM. So we are now doing a clinical trial of TM and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis."

Dr. Brewer says, "Also, we discovered that TM is inhibiting inflammatory cytokines. Many diseases are a result of overactivity of inflammatory chemical messengers. We are now working on some of the diseases that may be benefited by lowering copper levels that are of an inflammatory nature such as psoriasis and a disease of the intestinal tract called Crohn’s disease. So these interests have caused us to spread out into a variety of different disease areas."

A trial is also planned on a disease of cirrhosis called primary biliary cirrhosis.

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SOURCE: Ivanhoe Interview with George Brewer, M.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor