Anti-Candida activity of the anti-cancer drug tamoxifen.

Earlier workers found that tamoxifen, a drug widely used to treat breast cancer, can exert a marked antifungal action against the non-pathogenic yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In this report, the earlier observation has been extended to Candida albicans, the most important of the opportunistic fungal pathogens. Experiments in which antifungal effect against logarithmic phase cells was monitored by viable count as a function of drug exposure time clearly showed that tamoxifen is highly fungicidal at 2.0 x 10(-5) M, moderately and transiently fungicidal at 1.0 x 10(-5) M, but only very weakly fungistatic at 5.0 x 10(-6) M.