Repurposing To Fight Cancer: The Metformin-Prostate Cancer Connection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Already recommended as a first-line therapy for diabetic men diagnosed with prostate cancer, metformin is one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Diabetics use it every day to control blood sugar. Oncology may offer another use for the drug. Results from retrospective studies have been mixed depending on whether the study examined prevention or cancer outcomes. But on the basis of recent evidence, researchers suggest that it may be time to conduct prospective trials of metformin to test its effectiveness on prostate cancer progression. In one study, diabetic men with prostate cancer who took metformin were less likely to die from their cancer and lived statistically significantly longer irrespective of prostate cancer treatment received ( J. Clin. Oncol. 2013;31:3069–75). The same analysis, by Neil Fleshner, M.D., of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Canada, showed a 24% decrease in death from prostate cancer for each cumulative 6 months of treatment with metformin. The almost-3,900-patient retrospective study showed that this benefit was specific to metformin: Other diabetes drugs did not have the same effect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".