Pamela Goodwin has received hundreds of emails from patients asking if they should take a cheap, readily available drug, metformin, to treat their cancer.
It’s a fair question: Metformin, commonly used to treat diabetes, has been investigated for treating a range of cancer types in thousands of studies on laboratory cells, animals, and people. But Goodwin, an epidemiologist and medical oncologist treating breast cancer at the University of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, advises against it. No gold-standard trials have proved that metformin helps treat breast cancer — and her recent research suggests it doesn’t.
