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| Saturday, 17 July 2004 |
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New drug may offer new hope for leukemia patients WASHINGTON, Friday (Reuters) A second-generation cancer drug offers one last shot at life for leukemia patients who have not been helped by the "miracle" drug Gleevec, doctors reported. Tests on mice show the experimental drug overcomes virtually all of the genetic mutations that cause some cancers to resist treatment with Gleevec, the researchers report. Gleevec, made by Swiss drug company Novartis AG and sold in Europe under the name Glivec, was the first "targeted" cancer drug. The findings, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, add to evidence that precisely targeted cancer drugs can be designed quickly and rushed into testing for the most desperate cancer patients. Unpublished findings, which the researchers may not discuss, suggest the new drug is working safely and in some cases dramatically in some chronic myeloid leukemia patients who had run out of options. "We hope this represents another viable treatment option for patients with this disease," said Dr. Neil Shah of the University of California Los Angeles, who worked on the study. "There may now be hope beyond Gleevec should their disease relapse." Taken as a pill, the drug produced remarkable results in patients with advanced chronic myeloid leukemia, an immune-system cancer that kills about half the 4,000 or so people affected in the United States each year. But about 15 percent of patients are not helped by Gleevec. Researchers discovered a series of genetic mutations in their tumors that helped the cancer cells evade its effects. Gleevec, known chemically as imatinib, works by attaching to and blocking an enzyme called BCR-ABL that helps leukemia cells grow. Mutations in this enzyme change its shape enough so that Gleevec cannot attach itself. "We realized if we want to develop drugs that inhibit the mutants, they need to be a little sloppier, less demanding in their binding rules," said Dr. Charles Sawyers, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at UCLA. Members of a closely related class of drugs called SRC inhibitors also sometimes attach to and block ABL, he discovered. "Bristol Myers Squibb had a SRC inhibitor program and they called me," added Sawyer, who worked on the development of Gleevec and led this week's study. One drug, BMS-354825 being developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, looked like it would work perfectly against the mutated versions of CML cells. |
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