A New Role for Viagra?

A new study published in PNAS is adding to the list of health problems Viagra could be used to treat, says Forbes' David DiSalvo. The study says that sildenafil, the compound sold as Viagra, could be used to treat malignant melanoma as it appears to counteract inflammation caused by a tumor. The researchers gave a group of mice with melanoma Viagra in their drinking water, and found that after seven week, twice as many mice in the treatment group survived compared with untreated control mice, DiSalvo says. "And in the treated mice, T cell counts had returned to normal — indicating that they weren’t being suppressed by the tumor’s inflammatory response — and molecules within the T cells that would typically be deactivated by the tumor’s immune response had also returned to normal," he adds.