Encouraging research results that will help to treat acute myeloid leukemia
A new experimental protocol eliminates leukemia cells resistant to chemotherapy
Acute myeloblastic leukemia is the most common type of leukemia in adults: more than 1,300 Canadians are diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia each year and more than 1,000 die from this disease.
We are pleased to announce that a research project on acute myeloblastic leukemia at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI), which was funded in part by the Cancer Research Society, has shown very promising results. An experimental treatment eliminated all signs of leukemia, demonstrating a 100% remission rate.
The team of researchers, composed of William Stanford, Caryn Ito and Mitchell Sabloff, is blown away by the results.
Research has first shown that patients in whom MTF-2 is present at a normal level respond much better to chemotherapy than patients with a low levels of MTF-2. The team therefore wanted to learn more about why low levels of MTF-2 made leukemic cells resistant to chemotherapy. They discovered that when MTF-2 is weakly expressed, another protein, called MDM2, increases and causes resistance to chemotherapy.
MDM2 is a protein known to be an “enabler” of cancer, and drugs that can block it are already in clinical trials. It is by combining one of these inhibitory drugs with regular chemotherapy that the researchers have seen their encouraging results.
What’s next ?
The research team plans to undertake clinical trials that will test pharmaceutical grade MDM2 inhibitors in combination with standard chemotherapy. The research team is also considering drug repurposing by evaluating drugs already approved for other diseases to determine if they can also block MDM2 activity.
To learn more, we invite you to read the complete article on the OHRI website: www.ohri.ca