Arthritis drug may treat breast cancer

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands, May 6 (UPI) -- The anti-inflammatory drug celecoxib used to treat arthritis and other painful conditions may be helpful in treating breast cancer, a Dutch researcher says.

Lead researcher Juergen Veeck of Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands says the results of a randomized trial in 45 patients with primary invasive breast cancer showed the drug clearly induced an anti-tumor response at the molecular level.

Celecoxib is a member of a class of drugs known as selective COX-2 inhibitors that target COX-2, an enzyme responsible for inflammation and pain, Veeck says.

"This is exciting because it means that a medication already used to treat other diseases may be efficient in the adjuvant treatment of breast cancer as well," Veeck says in a statement. "We were pleased that the results from our clinical trial largely confirmed the existing data from several pre-clinical studies by showing that COX-2 inhibition leads to changes in cell proliferation, apoptosis and extracellular matrix biology in primary breast cancer tissues."

The findings are being presented at the IMPAKT Breast Cancer Conference in Brussels.