It is an existing antioxidant called metoquinone mesylate, marketed under the name MitoQ (pronounced in English, “MaïtoKiew”). It is sold today as a dietary supplement, but has shown potential in certain medical indications. Today, MitoQ opens very interesting perspectives against the development of metastases and recurrence in breast cancer.
Pierre Sonveaux, researcher at the Experimental and Clinical Research Institute of UCLouvain, and his team, including post-doctoral student Tania Capeloa, have identified that this drug would prevent the appearance of metastases in 80% of cases. and to avoid, in 75% of cases, the local relapse of human breast cancer. So far, these promising results have been obtained in mice.
This world first is published in the scientific journal Cancers et ouvr
A combined treatment
MitoQ was not administered alone, however: the researchers treated mice with human breast cancer as patients are treated in the hospital. They therefore combined surgery with a cocktail of skilfully dosed classic chemotherapies and added this additional molecule, MitoQ, to this classic treatment. The latter was found to be compatible with conventional chemotherapies and was effective against relapses and metastases in mice.
According to UCLouvain scientists, it is the MitoQ molecule that effectively prevents cancer stem cells from waking up. Pierre Sonveaux, FNRS Research Director and professor at UCLouvain is very enthusiastic. It took his team 7 years to identify this drug: ” We are a long way from an experimental laboratory molecule. Here, we are talking about a real drug that is able to prevent cancer metastasis, but also – and there, it was the discovery “wow”, to prevent the cancer from relapsing at the place where it had started originally developed.”
A persistent and recurring cancer
This research opens up new hopes for a large number of patients: in Belgium, the most aggressive and deadliest breast cancer is “triple negative” cancer. It accounts for 10-15% of all breast cancers. A thousand patients are affected each year in Belgium by this type of cancer. Half of them will develop, despite treatment, local recurrences and metastases. For the moment, there is no specific treatment to prevent these relapses, and only one in 10 patients with generalized “triple negative” cancer has a chance of being cured.
The hope of treatment as soon as the diagnosis is made
This frequency of metastatic cancers among human breast cancers is precisely why the team took this cancer as a model. Pierre Sonveaux places a lot of hope on the rest of the research: “Despite surgery, despite chemotherapy, in many cases, patients have relapses and metastases. We are able to predict these metastases, but for the moment there is nothing to prevent them. The best we can do, at the hospital, is when they occur, we give chemotherapy again. The molecule being worked on at UCLouvain could be given from the day of diagnosis of a cancer at risk of metastasis and maintained until the patient is cured.”
To be continued: phase 2 and phase 3 in humans
The next step is the test of the molecule in humans: the first clinical phase has already made it possible to test the product in healthy patients and it has proven to be of low toxicity. Then, a clinical phase 2 will begin to demonstrate the effectiveness of this treatment in cancer patients. The participants are already enrolled. And finally, even later, a phase 3. Revolution or hope? “We are beyond hope”enthuses Pierre Sonveaux.
The race between research and metastases is launched. The first part of the research was funded by sponsorship obtained by the UCLouvain Foundation. The manufacturer of MitoQ will provide funding for subsequent clinical phases.