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Drug Repurposing for Cancer: How Old Drugs Are Becoming New Treatments (2026)
Here’s the short version: drug repurposing — also called drug repositioning or drug reprofiling — means taking a medicine that’s already approved for one condition and finding a new job for it. In oncology, that includes antipsychotics, anti-inflammatory drugs, antivirals, diabetes drugs, antibiotics, and even antifungals. None of them were designed to fight cancer. Some of them, it turns out, are pretty good at it anyway. The best part? These drugs already have safety data. Researchers know their dosing, their side effects, how the body breaks them down. That means they can reach patients far faster — and at a fraction of the cost — than anything built from scratch.…
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Repurposing a 50-Year-Old Deworming Drug: How Scientists Are Turning Niclosamide Into a Cancer Fighter
Cancer research has always had a knack for finding treatments in strange places. The Pacific yew tree gave us paclitaxel. Soil bacteria produced doxorubicin. Now scientists are looking at another unlikely source: niclosamide, a drug that has been sitting in medicine cabinets since the 1970s as a tapeworm treatment. It started with a simple observation. Researchers noticed that this antiparasitic drug was killing cancer cells in petri dishes. That curiosity has since grown into a full drug development program. A team recently reported real progress in turning this old medication into a dual-targeting anticancer agent that works against breast and prostate cancers. The Problem with a Good Idea Niclosamide first…
