City of Hope scientists and doctors have discerned a more effective treatment for patients with Chronic myelogenous leukemia using a drug that was developed at the Institution to eradicate CML stem cells in accordance with the study published in Nature Medicine.
CML is a type of cancer that starts in the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and invades the blood. Although there are first-line drug treatments to induce long-term remission in CML patients, called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI), leukemia stem cells, which initiate and maintain the disease, frequently persist; these cells can result in a relapse of the disease. TKIs are also expensive and a patient with CML needs to take the drug for life.
City of Hope researchers aimed to find a treatment for CML that was effective enough for people to stop using TKIs. In their quest to find a cure for the disease, the team tested a drug called miristen. Developed at City of Hope, miristen targets one type of a microRNA that is expressed in leukemia stem cells, known as miR-126.
The optimistic results were witnessed in those treated with miristen and a TKI. Transplantation of the bone marrow cells collated from those treated with miristen and TKI resulted in no sign of leukemia in the healthy recipient mice, meaning all leukemia stem cells were eliminated. The researchers claim that miristen simply makes the TKIS more effective in killing the leukemia stem cells.
Zhang said “Miristen could be the drug that sends the disease into permanent remission.”