A new study has shed light on Viagra observing that Viagra can have anti-cancer, antibacterial, and therapeutic effects if used with new drugs.

The study has shown that how existing drugs such as Viagra or Cialis and a derivative of the drug Celebrex, for example, can reduce the activity of a specific chaperone protein, with the potential for anti-tumor and anti-Alzheimer's disease effects.

The authors describe how OSU-03012, an experimental compound derived from the drug celecoxib (Celebrex) interacts with Viagra or Cialis to reduce levels of chaperone proteins and reduced levels of HSPA5 and Dna K can interfere with virus replication, promote bacterial cell death, and even make drug-resistant "superbugs" susceptible to existing antibiotics.

In the article "HSPA5/Dna K May Be a Useful Target for Human Disease Therapies", Laurence Booth, Jane Roberts, and Paul Dent, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, provided a comprehensive discussion of the HSPA5/Dna K chaperone protein and the published evidence for its role in various human diseases. The authors describe how OSU-03012, an experimental compound derived from the drug celecoxib (Celebrex) interacts with Viagra or Cialis to reduce levels of chaperone proteins. Reduced levels of HSPA5 and Dna K can interfere with virus replication, promote bacterial cell death, and even make drug-resistant "superbugs" susceptible to existing antibiotics.

Carol Shoshkes Reiss, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, of DNA and Cell Biology and Professor, Departments of Biology and Neural Science, New York University, NY, said that drugs like Celebrex and Viagra were readily available and generally recognized as safe and this study by Booth and colleagues may lead to new applications of these relatively new medicines the potential impact, if the experiments described are translatable to human disease, could be paradigm-shifting.

Shoshkes added that the potential applications were serious antibiotic resistant infections, chemotherapy-resistant cancers, and neurodegenerative disease ranging from Parkinson's disease to Huntington's or Alzheimer's disease.