(OncologyNurseAdvisor.com) – A new compound that locks a disease-related protein into an inactive position stifled the growth of an aggressive form of leukemia in laboratory and animal tests, according to a new study published in Cancer Cell (2015; doi:10.1016/j.ccell.2015.06.005).
When the compound was combined with a steroid, the leukemia was reduced even further and the animals lived longer than they did when treated with the compound alone.
The results demonstrate that the technique, in which a drug compound shuts down the protein by snapping it closed and preventing it from functioning, can be especially effective in some cancers.
“Our results were achieved in an aggressive type of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia [B-ALL], the most common cancer in children and a highly fatal disease in adults,” said David Weinstock, MD, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, the co-senior author of the study with Christoph Gaul, PhD, of Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research. “But because the same protein is found in an abnormal form in other cancers, this approach holds promise for treating them as well.”
The study involved a variety of B-ALL in which the cancer cells carry a rearrangement of the gene CRLF2. (Such rearrangements occur when DNA damage causes certain genes to be out of their proper order in a chromosome.) While most children with B-ALL can be successfully treated, those with this genetic variant often do not fare as well.