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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…
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Niclosamide in Cancer Immunotherapy: Breaking Through Tumor Immune Evasion
Cancer researchers have spent decades staring at the same problem: the immune system can find cancer cells, but tumors keep slipping away. Why? A lot of it comes down to the tumor microenvironment—the neighborhood around a tumor where cancer cells essentially run a protection racket. Research from Carnegie Mellon University, published in Frontiers in Immunology in March 2026, suggests an old drug might help. Niclosamide has been around since the 1960s as a treatment for tapeworm infections. Now researchers are asking whether it could work against cancer too. What’s Going Wrong in the Tumor Microenvironment The area around a tumor isn’t just empty space. It’s full of activity, and cancer…
