"Fighting Sepsis with Cancer Drugs"
A new study shows that some cancer drugs may be able to quell the excessive inflammation that occurs in conditions such as sepsis, which is responsible for more than 250,000 deaths in the United States each year. Ivan Marazzi, PhD, an assistant professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and colleagues set out to explore how cells control the activity of genes that promote inflammation. One of the compounds that curbed gene activity, camptothecin, is a cancer treatment. Of the tested compounds, Marazzi says. “it probably would have been the last” he would have expected to work. Learn more.