This is about Drucker (in Oregon) and Novartis' STI-571 for treating CML
(an ABL-specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor).
Interesting, and seems extremely promising for CML.
ABC has a shallow story today at
abcnews.go.com
-- but it has nice links to sites with more information.
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The weekend of Dec 2, the newspapers were full of the STI-571 story,
because a just-ended 24-patient Ph I safety study produced surprisingly good results.
From the Dec 2 writeups:
"The drug acts by inhibiting the activity of BCR-ABL, an abnormal enzyme which causes an overabundance of white blood cells, Drucker said in a statement. . . .
Druker ... cautioned that more testing was needed to determine the drug's long-term effectiveness because patients had taken it for less than a year. He told Reuters he hoped it would be available to the public in two to three years.
The second round of human testing will start next month with about 200 patients, with 600 more to be enrolled later that year."
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Mijenko provided the relevant abstract:
Message 12188152
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UCLA's Jonsson Center did early trials, and has a writeup.
cancer.mednet.ucla.edu
Excerpts:
Early testing of STI-571 at UCLA focused on patients in the chronic stage of the disease who did not respond to standard treatments with interferon. ...
With interferon, the current standard therapy for CML, a small fraction of patients are cured, Sawyers said. Most relapse. A bone marrow transplant also can help, but Sawyers said fewer than 20 percent of CML patients qualify. . . .
At doses of around 200 mg of STI-571, nearly all the patients had their white blood cell counts return to normal levels.
At higher doses, the molecular cause of the disease - the genetic mutation - disappeared in some of the cases, [UCLA's Dr. Charles] Sawyers said." . . .
"I believe that in five years or sooner this drug will be the front-line therapy for CML if the results hold up as they have in the first phase of testing," Sawyers said. "I want to stress that this validates a whole concept of drug development: That through basic science we can understand what's wrong with a cancer cell and actually fix it."
Dr. Harmon Eyre of the American Cancer Society said it's rare to see a response in phase one testing of experimental drugs. But in this case, the testing has resulted in very good responses early on, which he calls "very exciting."
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STI-571 is specific for CML.
Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) is the most common of adult leukemias
-- especially among people who've undergone chemotherapy for another cancer.
(Seattle's beloved school superintendent, John Stanford, died of AML.)
Less common - Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML).
People with CML usually have a genetic abnormality (the Philadelphia chromosome). |
