In
the late1950s and early ‘60s, the drug Thalidomide was prescribed to
combat morning sickness (among other things) except in the US, where the
FDA didn’t trust the safety reports. That mistrust was arranged, as many
women who took the drug miscarried, or gave birth to children with a
variety of birth defects. After a few years, Thalidomide was recalled
and the very name became synonymous with the tragic consequences of
inadequate drug testing. But outside of the headlines, a strange thing
happened: medicine began to find new uses for the discredited drug.
In
1964, Israeli doctor Jacob Sheskin had patients with harsh leprosy
symptoms involving painful lesions. While looking for any possible drug
available, he came upon thalidomide in his office’s apothecary. He gave
it to the patient, and it worked almost immediately: the lesions
practically disappeared overnight.
Doctors began using it for
other illnesses that seemed biochemically related, and found another
astonishing effect: it elongated the lives of people with bone and blood
cancers. In 1999, Dr. Bart Barlogie of the University of Arizona
studied 84 patients who took the drug: a third of the patients improved
while two went completely into remission. More studies about how this
worked followed in 2010, by which time thalidomide was once again seen
as a drug with much potential.
More research
pinpointed the mechanism that Thalidomide uses to target cancer cells,
and it is used more widely for a variety of cancers.
Read about this new direction in cancer treatment at Atlas Obscura.
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