A New Drug can revolutionise leukaemia treatment

A drug that appears to stop one form of leukaemia, a type of blood cancer, in its tracks has been unveiled by researchers who said the experimental medicine could revolutionise cancer treatment.

They said all 31 patients who had received 300 milligrams daily of the drug -- called Sti-571 -- had seen their potentially fatal cases of chronic myelogenous leukaemia go into remission and their white and red blood cell counts return to normal
They suffered minimal side effects such as muscle cramping and stomach upset from the three pills a day.

''When we started seeing these kinds of results, we were incredibly excited,'' Dr Brian Druker of the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, who developed the drug in collaboration with scientists at Novartis Pharmaceuticals.
Dr 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.
Dr Druker said Sti-571, part of a new class of drug called a ''signal transduction inhibitor,'' broke new ground for cancer treatments because it attacked the enzyme that triggered leukaemia without affecting the body's healthy cells.
Standard cancer treatments are often accompanied by debilitating side effects because of their general toxicity.

The only treatment for this type of leukaemia is a bone marrow transplant, which is ''a very traumatic procedure,'' Dr Druker said.

''One of the major goals of cancer research has been to identify differences between cancer cells and normal cells so that these differences can be targeted with more effective and less toxic treatments,'' he said. ''That's exactly what we've seen happen in these patients.''

''The potential significance of this type of research extends beyond leukaemia,'' Dr Druker said.

He said that in several patients Sti-571 appeared to have eliminated cancer-causing cells altogether.

''But it's too early to be talking about a cure.'' Reuters