BY EVA VON SCHAPER
IT COSTS $475,000 PER PATIENT TO treat childhood leukemia with the cutting- edge therapy Kymriah. But what if a cancer drug could be had for pennies a day because it already existed?
That’s exactly what happened when French doctors used a decades-old blood pressure medication on a child with a benign tumor. The drug, called propranolol, lowered blood pressure but also shrank the tumor. In subsequent studies, a regimen including propranolol was also an effective treatment for patients with angiosarcoma, a rare cancer of the blood vessels with a poor survival rate.