Standard drug could cure leukaemia
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Some leukaemia patients could be cured of their disease by a standard drug treatment, new trial results suggest.
A proportion of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) remained completely free of the disease two years after doctors stopped treating them with the drug imatinib, trial results indicated.
It had been believed that the disease would always return if treatment was halted, due to the presence of resistant stem cells.
Glivec, the standard treatment for CML, a slow-growing, long-term form of leukaemia, works by switching off an enzyme linked to the cancer, leading to reduced levels of an abnormal protein called BCR/ABL.
In some patients, imatinib can produce complete molecular remission (CMR), marked by the protein becoming undetectable.
The scientists, led by Professor Francois-Xavier Mahon, from Victor Segalen Bordeaux University in France, reported their findings in the journal The Lancet Oncology.
However, the authors pointed out that sustained complete molecular remission – the prerequisite for stopping treatment – did not often occur. Suitable candidates for treatment stoppage might represent only about 10 per cent of patients.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments