Having had remarkable success at treating chronic myelogenous leukemia with Gleevec, scientists are trying it with other forms of cancer.
Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
The gene that drive the chronic myelogenous leukemia is one of a set of genes that we all have in every cell, there are 96 of them, they are enzymes that are called kinases, and the drug that Brain and his colleagues developed works a little bit like a key in an ignition switch, that in a cancer cell, if you turn these kinases on, it's little bit like a key turning an engine, one that causes that cell to grow and to divide and expand without any control, and the drug that he developed works to turn that key back off again. Now that's one key to one gene that causes cancer, CML. But we now know that out of these 96 other enzymes, kinases, most cancers appear to have the same types of keys in the lock on position, so we can try to identify those and try to identify compounds that are likely to be effective not just for treating other kinds of leukemias but for treating solid tumors. There's a gastro-intestinal tumor that's incredibly difficult to treat that turns out to have the same lock and key arrangement that chronic myelogenous leukemia has. Gleevec works very effectively in that context. So we believe that these findings will be extrapolatable to a whole variety of solid tumors that rely on these kinds of signals for their growth and proliferation.