LA Times Blogs: Metformin: New 'wonder drug' may help prevent lung cancer in smokers

Metformin, a safe and inexpensive drug widely used to lower blood glucose in Type 2 diabetics, may have a variety of other uses, researchers are finding. The newest, reported Monday at a Washington meeting of the American Assn. for Cancer Research, is to prevent lung cancer in smokers… At an American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting on genitourinary cancers last month, Dr. Cristiano Ferrario of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, reported that metformin could inhibit the growth of prostate cancer cells in the laboratory -- albeit by inhibiting a different receptor.