A new study has revealed that anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) reverses resistance to tamoxifen, a widely used breast cancer drug, in mice.
According to the study by researchers from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, adding HCQ to tamoxifen could provide a new treatment option for some women with advanced, postmenopausal estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer.
The study found that the ER+ subtype accounts for an estimated 70 percent of all breast cancers.
The study's senior investigator, Robert Clarke, said that Tamoxifen resistance when treating breast cancer is a big issue in the clinic, and we believe our findings provide a very promising fix to the problem.
The study was published in Clinical Cancer Research.
