Word: myeloid
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...February of last year, Victoria Reiter, 63, figured she had only a few months to live. A writer and translator living in Manhattan, she was suffering from chronic myeloid leukemia, an especially deadly form of blood cancer. The only treatment available was interferon, an immune-system booster that wasn't really working and that made her violently ill. Reiter had spent most of 1999 in bed, too sick to read, to walk, to do much of anything?although she had managed to put together lists dividing her possessions between her two daughters...
...months to approve a new cancer treatment, you know it's got to be some kind of breakthrough. And indeed the drug called Gleevec, which was given the go-ahead last week in record time, has produced dramatic results in patients with a rare malignancy called chronic myeloid leukemia. It's too early to say just how good Gleevec is. But the drug's success so far makes one thing clear. When designing a safe, effective treatment for a particular cancer, it pays to learn as much as possible about its underlying molecular biology...
...Chronic myeloid leukemia is one of those rare cancers that occur as the result of a single genetic accident--in this case, a mutation that causes blood cells to multiply uncontrollably. Gleevec works by blocking the chemical signal responsible for that wayward growth...
...hard not to get excited about an experimental cancer drug that shows real promise fighting chronic myeloid leukemia. The standard treatments for this rare disease--chemotherapy and interferon--are pretty tough on the body. Bone-marrow transplants can lead to a cure, but even patients with a perfectly matched donor face a 20% risk of dying in the first six months after the procedure...
Still, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. Chronic myeloid leukemia occurs as the result of a single genetic accident. By blocking the wayward protein that is formed as a result, Glivec tricks the leukemic cells into, in essence, committing suicide. (Normal white blood cells soon take their place.) So far, 51 of 53 patients who received the highest dose of the drug in one of the studies have gone into remission. In seven of those cases doctors can no longer detect any cancer-causing genetic abnormalities...