The cancer drugs in your bathroom cabinet

Researchers have had promising results treating tumours with everyday medicines. So why aren't the big pharma companies investing in trials?

Helen Hewitt lost her mother, her younger brother and her baby son to cancer. Having successfully overcome breast cancer herself, she is currently battling several tumours in her lungs, and - thanks to an inherited mutation in her DNA - is at high risk of developing other cancers as well. Yet Helen, 41, is pioneering an unfamiliar approach against this all too familiar foe. Alongside conventional chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy, she is taking a cocktail of experimental yet well-known medicines. Some of them might even be in your bathroom cabinet.

One is the diabetes drug metformin, which besides making healthy cells more sensitive to the effects of the hormone insulin may also help to starve sugar-hungry cancer cells. The cholesterol-lowering statin and the antibiotic she's been prescribed have the added benefit of dampening inflammation - a process cancer cells use to help them grow. Then there's mebendazole, a common treatment for threadworm, which may also inhibit the growth of the blood vessels to her tumours.

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