Off-Label Use: Pain Medication and Antipsychotics May Stop Brain Tumor Growth

After screening nearly 1,300 chemical compounds, scientists have identified a number of drugs in use today that may in stop the growth of neural stem cells, including cancerous populations. This opens up the possibility of using drugs already available to battle brain tumors, which kill an estimated 13,000 people in the U.S. yearly. Researchers say that a lot of the receptors for those drugs were thought to be exclusively expressed in mature cells in the central nervous system and they may have the same function on stem cells as they do on the mature cells, which makes them candidates for treating brain cancer.

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