The birth-defect drug that came back to fight cancer

Decades later, researchers at the University of Arkansas tried it in patients with multiple myeloma who had run out of other options, reasoning from theories about how tumors build new blood vessels that the same drug blamed for malformed limbs might starve tumors of their blood supply.

Bart Barlogie's team gave oral thalidomide to 84 patients with myeloma that had relapsed after other treatments, including high-dose chemotherapy in most cases. Thirty-two percent responded, including two complete remissions, in a disease where these patients had been expected to have few options left.

The result launched thalidomide and its newer chemical relatives, lenalidomide and pomalidomide, into standard myeloma treatment, where they remain core drugs today, combined with newer antibodies and transplants. Thalidomide itself is now dispensed only under strict pregnancy-prevention programs, a condition of its return, given the history that took it off the market in the first place.

A banned drug became a cancer backbone.