Malaria drug successfully treats 26-year-old brain cancer patient.

Malaria drug successfully treats 26-year-old brain cancer patient.The anti-authophagy drug chloroquine may be a unique way to resensitize some cancer patients to treatment. 26-year-old Lisa Rosendahl's doctors gave her only a few months to live,when her brain cancer became resistant to chemotherapy and then to targeted treatments. A paper published in the journal eLife describes a new drug combination that has stabilized Rosendahl's disease and increased both the quantity and quality of her life: Adding the anti-malaria drug chloroquine to her treatment stopped an essential process that Rosendahl's cancer cells had been using to resist therapy, re-sensitizing her cancer to the targeted treatment that had previously stopped working. Along with Rosendahl, two other brain cancer patients were treated with the combination and both showed similar, dramatic improvement.