Blood pressure drug shrinks Vancouver woman’s cancer

VANCOUVER – After five years of undergoing cancer treatments, Vancouver’s Trish Keating thought she had just months to live.

But now a drug normally used to treat high blood pressure is being credited for shrinking her tumours, in only five weeks.

“Everyday I feel phenomenal,” says Keating.

She had terminal colorectal cancer and decided last year to try a different approach from chemotherapy. She enrolled in a study at the B.C. Cancer Agency that uses  personalized onco-genomics (POG) to test tumours to determine what drugs might be best to treat them.

“They took my tumour and they analyzed it and put it up against a number of drugs,” says Keating. “Aside from a lot of chemotherapy drugs that came up as fighting it, there was this one drug that had nothing to do with chemotherapy at all and that came through as being effective.”

WATCH: Dr. Samual Abraham with the BC Cancer Agency tells Global News the science behind Keating’s miraculous recovery.

She started taking the drug in mid-December and shortly after she noticed her energy levels were much higher than before.

“I’d had enough chemotherapy in my life, believe me.”

After five weeks Keating had a PET/CT scan and doctors noticed her tumours had diminished “considerably.” She had another scan five weeks later and all her tumours were virtually gone.

“I’m a living walking miracle and a testament to this new program that… analyzes each person’s individual genomics.”

One of the researchers involved in the study cautions it could be years before the treatment is widely used and it’s still not clear if it will work for all types of cancer.

The name of the drug is not being released until Lim’s paper is reviewed and published.

– With files from The Canadian Press.