More surprising-ful.
"Wonder drug" Gleevec is also a boon for people with arthritis.
TEDTHAI / Time Life Pictures / GETTY IMAGES
Even before the drug against the Gleevec cancer hit the US market in 01, it was hailed as a miracle drug, designed to target the molecular defect behind the cancer chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). But for a handful of cancer patients who also happened to have rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the drug had a surprising bonus effect: It eased their arthritis symptoms. Now a team of scientists has discovered that in arthritic mice, Gleevec control the proliferation of several types of immune cells that can trigger flares of autoimmune disease.
Gleevec was designed to block a CML causing protein called Bcr / Abl, one of a family of proteins known as the tyrosine kinase name. But shortly after it was approved, Glivec has been found to inhibit other tyrosine kinase called c-kit, which is defective in people with a rare gastrointestinal tumor. Immunologist and rheumatologist William Robinson of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues wondered whether Gleevec might also have a tyrosine kinase that help impact the inflammatory cells proliferate in arthritic joints.
They started by injecting mice with a drug that triggers the autoimmune arthritis. One day before the scheduled start of arthritis, 29 mice either a high or low dose of Gleevec (comparable to patients taking doses of cancer) and 15 got a placebo. In the high dose group, about a quarter of the mice developed arthritis, compared to about half of the mice in the low dose group and almost all received a placebo. Both doses have virtually stopped growing arthritis in mice that had already developed symptoms, the researchers report online September 14 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation . Additional experiments with cultured cells have shown that tyrosine kinases Gleevec blocks that stimulate the proliferation of B cells and mast cells, immune system cells that can aggravate the symptoms of arthritis.
Blocking only inflammatory cells that were thought behind RA are promising candidate Gleevec treatment, said Kari Eklund, a rheumatologist at the Central Hospital of the University of Helsinki in Finland. There are three years old, he and his colleagues offered Gleevec three RA patients with a serious illness and has seen an improvement in two of them. But he and Robinson agree that more work is needed to determine whether the drug is effective in RA -. And perhaps many other autoimmune diseases
Related Sites
- the disadvantage of Gleevec
- Information on RA the Arthritis Foundation
- Information on Gleevec for the Food and Drug administration
0 Komentar