New clinical research shows that lamivudine, a reverse transcriptase inhibitor widely used in HIV therapy, stopped disease progression in 25% of patients with fourth-line metastatic colorectal cancer. Findings from the trial, published in Cancer Discovery, raise the possibility of an unexpected promising direction in cancer treatment, not just colorectal cancer.
The trial included 32 patients with advanced metastatic colon cancer whose disease progressed despite four lines of previous cancer treatments. The first nine patients received the standard HIV-approved dose of lamivudine.
