The team then tested nitroxoline for its ability to stop blood vessel growth in mice. They treated 10 mice with growth factors that encourage new vessel growth, then treated half with nitroxoline and the other half with only salt solution for comparison. After 10 days they discovered that untreated mice on the average developed 48.6 new vessels per microscope field ??” the area visible when looking at the tissue through a microscope ??” --whereas nitroxoline-treated mice on average developed only 20 new vessels per microscope field. "Because nitroxoline showed such a substantial inhibitory effect, we moved on to see if it would have an effect on tumors in mice," says Liu.

Mice carrying transplanted human breast or bladder cancer cells were treated with nitroxoline injections every other day for a month in the case of breast cancer or every day for two weeks in the case of bladder cancer. Nitroxoline treatment reduced breast cancer cell tumor volume by 60 percent and bladder cancer cell tumor by more than 50 percent.

"There are limitations of this study, but we find the results encouraging enough to pursue further study of nitroxoline for preclinical and clinical use in treating bladder carcinomas," says Liu.

Source: Johns Hopkins University