Childhood Leukaemia Studies Could Hold Key To Greater Cancer Treatment Advances
Successful demonstrations of a possible new drug to treat the most common form of
leukaemia found in babies have led scientists to believe that it could be adapted to treat other forms of the common blood or bone marrow cancer.While it is estimated that 90 per cent of all leukaemias are discovered in adults, the disease is nonetheless contracted by between 20,000 and 25,000 youngsters each year. It proves fatal in more than four in every five people who develop the disease.
The disease is one of the most extensively researched today, and there has been some success in its treatment using gene therapy. A small-scale trial on three patients has resulted in the cancer being eliminated completely in two of them, and greatly reduced in the third.
Its cause has been found to lie with a gene called MLL. When this gene becomes fused to another one, a 'fusion protein' is created. This then switches on genes which are responsible for the development of leukaemia.
In many cases, treatments for the disease prove short-lived because, even when they succeed in killing large parts of the cancer, it soon returns.
But tests using a new chemical agent, I-BET 151, show that it is able to mimic certain chemical 'tags' which attach themselves to chromatin, the framework on which human DNA is mounted, this prevents the MLL gene from forging its own link with the chromatin, and going on to switch on the genes which cause leukaemia.
Leaders of the study have acknowledged that so-called mixed-lineage leukaemia is difficult to treat, with the result that a bone marrow transplant is usually the only course of action open to doctors. But because this is a traumatic procedure at any age, they are hopeful that the need to carry it out can be reduced in the future.
More extensive human trials of the treatments are planned, including on patients with other forms of cancer, as its developers are hopeful that it will have some beneficial effects in treating these too.
Leukaemia can be an illness which causes great distress among its sufferers, and their loved ones, especially as it can advance at hugely varying rates. Like many of the other cancers to which it is related, though, there can be a light at the end of the tunnel, and the current research, which is being led by British scientists, offers realistic hope that incidences of leukaemia, and its current painful and distressing treatment, might soon be greatly reduced.
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