Bactericidal Cancer Drug

The threat of multidrug-resistant bacteria is ever growing, but the list of new antibiotics is certainly not. Researchers are thus starting to turn to existing drugs that might have additional infection-fighting potential. One such drug is tamoxifen, which is used by hundreds of thousands of patients for treating certain breast cancers. Aside from tamoxifen’s cancer-suppressing activity, the drug is known to modulate the production of certain fats called sphingolipids. It just so happens that sphingolipids modulate the behaviour of immune cells called neutrophils, which are adept at disposing of bacteria. Researchers have now shown that tamoxifen boosts neutrophils’ antibacterial activities including phagocytosis – the gobbling-up of the bugs – and production of neutrophil extracellular traps, or NETS (pictured) – long sticky strands of chromatin expelled from neutrophils that ensnare and kill bacteria. Indeed, in mice infected with MRSA, a major hospital 'superbug', tamoxifen treatment significantly boosted bacterial clearance.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine
• Copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Nature Communications, October 2015