Type of Leukemia Can Be Cured with Imatinib

Being diagnosed with leukemia in the past has been a precarious diagnosis often resulting eventually in death. Scientists at U.C.I. in Irvine , California has discovered that a certain medication that they say will cure the type of leukemia that is known as chronic myeloid leukemia or C.M.L. The drug has been shown to drive the cancer into remission. In some patients suffering from C.M.L., the disease sometimes returns after treatment is halted. New research has shown that Imatinib can cure the deadly form of leukemia if the medication is given over a long enough period of time.

C.M.L is a quickly growing cancer that originates in the bone marrow and then moves quickly into the blood. The bone marrow is the birth place of red blood cells. There are three stages in this type of leukemia. The last stage is in which the patient survives for only a short period of time. In 2007 an estimated 4,570 people in the United States were diagnosed with C.M.L. Out of these some 490 people will succumb to the disease this year says information from the National Cancer Institute, a division of the U.S. National Institute of Health.

Imatinib is a promising treatment for cancer because it has few of the side effects usually associated with cancer treatments. The medication also specifically targets the cancer cells. In the study done at U.C.I. scientists focused on Imatinib and and how cancer stem cells behave. Normal stem cells maintain body and organ function and cancer stem cells maintain cancer growth and are usually difficult to kill with treatment.

Mathematician Natalie Komarova and Biologist Dominik Wodarz have developed a tool that eventually will aide doctors in determining which combination of drugs might be most beneficial to C.M.L. patients. They developed a mathematical calculation that will aide in the cancer diagnosis and will help indiviualize the patients treatment. They also determined why in some cases the Imatinib does not seem to halt cancer growth.

Some scientists believe that Imatinib can kill regular cancer cells but not the stem cells. At the end of the treatment the remaining stem cells can produce more cancer cells causing the course of the disease to exhilarate. According to this view C.M.L. is incurable.

The UCI scientists believe that the medicine can kill the cancerous stem cells but not when the cells have temporally stopped dividing a state known as the quiescent state. The evidence seems to show that after this cell cessation ends and the cells begin waking up the Imatinib can kill the stem cells. All cancer cells have this ability to enter the quiescent state.

Komarova says, "There is evidence that a complete cure is possible. Basically one must be on therapy long enough for all the stem cells to wake up and be killed by the drug".

Several patients during the study at UCI reported no symptoms after two months with no treatment. This is indicative of a complete and total cure of the leukemia. One other barrier to eradication of the disease by Imatinib is that the cancer cells can mutate and become unresponsive to certain drugs. The scientists have proven this theory wrong also. According to their calculations mutant cells are created early in the disease process often times before the patient even knows that they are sick. Using their new mathematical calculations they can determine which patients may be subject to difficulties and they can determine what course of individual treatment can be used to overcome this resistance.

The results of the study will appear in the October issue of the Journal Public Library of Science ONE.

Sources used in this article are as follows: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1669