“Killing Cancer” by Dr. Julian Lieb reviews medical research showing that antidepressants have potent anticancer properties.

BURLINGTON, Vt.
More than 120 clinical, laboratory and epidemiological studies illuminate the anticancer properties of antidepressants. Antidepressants kill cancer cells, inhibit their proliferation, protect nonmalignant cells from damage by ionizing radiation and chemotherapy toxicity, convert multidrug resistant cells to sensitive, and target the mitochondria of cancer cells while sparing those of healthy ones. Depression significantly increases the risk of cancer, and increases and accelerates its mortality. Antidepressants are capable of arresting cancer even in advanced stages, and occasionally eradicating it. Published reports to date reveal that antidepressants are potentially effective for such treatment resistant malignancies as cancer of the lungs, kidneys, and liver, malignant gliomas of the brain, and inflammatory breast cancer. Lieb points out that the use of relatively inexpensive antidepressants could make cancer treatment available to low-income and disadvantaged segments of the population. By slashing the cost of cancer care, antidepressants could energize health reform and economic recovery.

“Great advances seldom emanate from ivory tower medical schools or government health agencies,” Lieb says. “They are often made by outsiders that draw together observations whose relationship to each other had never been suspected.”

In making the case for antidepressants, Lieb discusses prostaglandins, molecules that regulate the physiology of every cell in the body. When produced above a critical threshold, prostaglandins can cause many disorders including depression and cancer. By inhibiting the production of prostaglandins, antidepressants can defeat cancer. Cancer is not a hundred different diseases, as touted, but one disease with innumerable variations.

“Killing Cancer” is available for sale online at Amazon.com and other channels.

About the Author
Dr. Julian Lieb is a retired Yale School of Medicine professor and author or co-author of 48 published articles and 11 books, Lieb is a recognized expert on the immunostimulating and antimicrobial properties of lithium and antidepressants, and the anticancer properties of antidepressants. He has worked closely with pioneers in prostaglandin research, and has been invited to address international cancer conferences in Greece, Germany and India.

Julian@DoctorLieb.com

Health plans and employers are far more aware of the costs of these agents (administered under both pharmacy and medical benefit plans) than has been the case in the past. More importantly they are undertaking a multifaceted effort to bring ever escalating costs down. This will be more complicated than the simple three-tier co-pays that largely killed the markets for small molecule chronic disease therapies during the last decade, but it is likely to work.

First, the old style “Buy and Bill” as a major source of income for oncologists is rapidly being replaced by far less profitable “ASP Plus” pricing models. This started off as part of the Medicare Modernizations Act, but has now kicked into high gear. Instead of making huge markups on the spread between actual purchase price and Average Wholesale Price, physicians will earn a far smaller margin of 8%-10%. At the same time, patients will increasingly be facing co-insurance rather than fixed co-payments for specialty Rx products. Such co-insurance payments are likely to be in the 20%-30% range, much as we see for specialty Rx products administered under the pharmacy benefit in Medicare Part D today, except that for commercial lives, there won’t be the same sort of catastrophic cap seen in the Federal program. It will also be applied to products administered by physicians in their offices (medical benefit) as well as those self-administered by the patient (pharmacy benefit). Since the average US household earns about $60,000 per year, this will be a significant burden.

While these economic pressures are clearly a blunt instrument, they will serve their core purpose of bringing down growth rates in these markets. If manufacturers want to continue to earn good returns on these agents, they will have to demonstrate good value for money (however slippery that concept is) rather than rely on the perverse financial incentives for both patients and physicians that helped drive the sales of these agents in the past. There are several strategies that manufacturers can undertake to be responsive to the emerging requirements for success, but complaining isn’t one of them.

However, it put such great pressure that the companion diagnostics that were approved often had been mostly or totally ineffective at identifying clinical responders to the various therapies. That is because genomics/epigenomics are far too limited in scope to encompass the vagaries and complexities of human cancer biology.

Although any number of labs and techniques can detect mutant genes, this area of pharmacogenomics was ripe for proprietary tests, invented alongside the drug and owned by the drug developer and/or a partner in the diagnostics field. This business opportunity evolved as more drugs were approved with companion diagnostics.

Unfortunately, the introduction of these drugs has not been accompanied by specific predictive tests allowing for a rational and economical use of the drugs. Patients, physicians, insurance carriers, and the FDA should be calling for predictive tests that allow for rational and cost-effective use of these highly expensive drugs.

Given the technical and conceptual advantages of functional profiling assays, together with their performance and the modest efficacy of therapy prediction based on analysis of genome expression, there is reason for a renewal in their interest for optimized use of medical treatment of malignant disease.

The overpayments have been justified as necessary for covering unreimbursed nursing and social work services to patients ( although very few private oncology practices– where the majority of US adults are treated– have social work staff, no matter how much a holistic team approach is important).

Regarding Observer’s comments, patient assistance programs (PAPs) are at best a stop-gap measure needed today,and at worst, window-dressing to enhance a company’s ” corporate social responsibility” profile. PAPs are not a sustainable solution for many reasons, starting with the fact that they are not regulated, and exclude too many patients, plus often require onerous applications procedures.