Histamine: a potential cytoprotective agent to improve cancer therapy?

MARTINEL LAMAS DJ ; NICOUD MB; STERLE HA; CREMASCHI GA; MEDINA VA

CELL DEATH AND DIFFERENTIATION

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2015 vol. 6

1350-9047

Chemotherapy along with radiotherapy is a major treatment of medical oncology. Despite their therapeutic effects achieving local tumor control and in many cases controlling metastasis, both approaches can produce serious adverse effects to normal tissues either immediately or during the long term after treatment. Regardless of the high incidence of cancer therapy-associated adverse reactions (e.g., hepato, hemato and cardio toxicities) and their significant impact on morbidity, mortality and health economics; as far as we know, there are no standard, clinically approved, effective agents that could improve the therapeutic index of chemo and radiotherapy, controlling these devastating side effects in patients undergoing anti-tumoral treatments. In this line, there are several reports demonstrating that histamine could be a promising selective pharmacological agent for the protection of radiosensitive healthy tissues against ionizing radiation-induced adverse effects. Histamine administration was safely used in different radiobiological experimental models and produced a marked preservation of gamma radiation impaired morphological and functional characteristics of small intestine, salivary glands and bone marrow. It is important to highlight that histamine exerts anti-proliferative effects in different experimental models of human breast cancer, melanoma and cholangiocarcinoma.Even more, histamine potentiates radiation-induced anti-neoplastic effects in human breast cancer cells.