BP Drug Blocks Breast Cancer

Reduce your blood pressure ““ cut your risk for breast cancer? New research shows a common blood pressure drug can block a breast cancer gene.

Losartan is prescribed to treat patients with high blood pressure. But in a recent study on mice, researchers found it blocked the gene AGTR1, a gene seen in 10 to 20 percent of breast cancers that causes normal breast cells to behave like cancer cells. After eight weeks of treatment with losartan, tumors that expressed AGTR1 shrunk by 30 percent.

"We suspect our analysis has uncovered a new crop of potentially important breast cancer genes," Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology, was quoted as saying. "What’s also exciting is this gene is blocked by a drug that’s already available on the market."

SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009