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Drug Helps Leukemia Patients Live Longer
– Reported, February 29, 2012
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — New research shows that patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) who do not respond to interferon treatments experience long-term benefits when they switch to the drug imatinib. Imatinib is proving to be the treatment of choice for these patients.
Imatinib is a drug that blocks the protein made by a particular cancer-causing gene. It is revolutionizing the initial treatment of CML patients. Ninety-three percent of patients who take imatinib as initial therapy survive eight years longer, that is two to five years longer than before imatinib was introduced. Imatinib is now the standard drug of choice.
Hagop Kantarjian, M.D., of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, led an experiment that analyzed 368 patients who started taking imatinib after interferon failed them. Approximately 68 percent of patients survived for at least 10 years, whereas previous research shows that only 20 to 30 percent of patients who did not respond to interferon survived as long. Hagop Kantarjian, M.D., and his colleagues believe that the study shows that most patients will benefit from imatinib after interferon treatments prove to be unsuccessful.
SOURCE: Cancer, February 2012
