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Chise
@sailorrooscout.bsky.social
Senior Scientist | Vaccine Research & Development | NIH | NIAID | VRC | 🧬🧫🦠🔬💉🥼🥽 | 🏳️‍🌈 | @coralchimera.bsky.social 💍
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Csailorrooscout.bsky.social

The next step was to test the drugs in a living, breathing system: mice with glioblastoma.

Mice were transplanted with glioblastoma tumors, and then assigned a group. The control group was left untreated, while a second group of mice was treated with the SSRI antidepressant citalopram. Finally, a third group was treated with vortioxetine.

Comparisons 38 days after implantation of the tumor revealed the vortioxetine treatment group had significantly less tumor growth and invasiveness than the control and citalopram groups, which displayed similar outcomes to each other.

In a follow-up experiment, another sample of glioblastoma mice was treated with standard chemotherapy drugs. Another group was given vortioxetine, while a third wasn't given any other treatment.

Similarly, the vortioxetine group had increased survival rates 20-30% above those of the chemo-only group, NOT just in the short term, BUT long-term, too.
Fig. 6: The anti-depressant vortioxetine confers significant survival benefit across preclinical trials and synergizes with standard-of-care glioblastoma treatments.
MRI scans of mouse brains from each group 38 days after tumor implantation. The top row is the control group; middle is citalopram; and the bottom is the vortioxetine group. The yellow line indicates the tumor. (Lee et al., Nat. Med., 2024)
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Csailorrooscout.bsky.social

With such promising pre-clinical results, additional trials in living human patients could reveal whether we may already have a glioblastoma therapy ready to fast-track. Researchers don't yet know whether the drug works in humans and what dose is required to combat the tumor,

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C
Chise
@sailorrooscout.bsky.social
Senior Scientist | Vaccine Research & Development | NIH | NIAID | VRC | 🧬🧫🦠🔬💉🥼🥽 | 🏳️‍🌈 | @coralchimera.bsky.social 💍
22.8k followers293 following9.4k posts