Curing leukemia may not be just a dream soon

Forbes has recently published an article talking about a small but promising biotechnology company called Agios, based in Cambridge, Mass., being on its path to development of a very effective treatment for leukemia. How effective? 3 out of seven patients who have been under the treatment are now cancer-free based upon clinical measurement.

At this year’s AACR (the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research), Dr. Eytan Stein, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, presented the results of the first study of Agios’ experimental pill AG-221 in patients with acute myeloid leukemia whose tumors have a mutation in a specific gene.

Ten AML patients were available for evaluation. Three of those had to stop taking the drug because they became sick due to their disease. Of the seven who were left, six saw their disease measurably improve. Three of them had all signs of cancer cells in their blood disappear — called a complete remission. Two more were close, but still had depleted platelet levels, which Stein says usually come up over time if they are already rising.

It’s too soon to tell exactly how effective AG-221 is, and bigger studies will have to be done. A larger version of the current study might get the medicine approved in AML patients who have failed every other option, but moving earlier in the disease will require studies in which AG-221 is compared to a placebo. This drug is years from the market.

But the results are obviously very encouraging. For Agios chief executive David Schenkein, these resultsImatinib are a big step toward proving the scientific ideas behind his company — targeted medicines based on the metabolic processes of cells — can result in drugs that are invented and brought to market significantly more quickly than is the norm in pharma.

In addition to prevent from oncogenic viral infection, cancer vaccine can also be used to directly treat cancer. Some cancers are generated from the normal cells infected by a virus, such as liver cancer and cervical cancer. The traditional vaccine can be used to prevent these viral infections, such as hepatitis B vaccine, cervical cancer vaccine, and so on. Scientists are working on another new vaccineALK inhibitor, intended to be used against cancer cells already present in the body. Some scientists believe that humans usually have the presence of cancer cells which could be destroyed by immune system. When the immune system failure, cancer resulting.

Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are the traditional ways of treating cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy may also be harmful to normal cancer cells. Therefore, the purpose of cancer vaccine nowadays is not only to the treatment of cancer but also to minimize side effects.

During 2003 to 2011, the global pharmaceutical companies developed 41 cancer vaccines, only 1 approved by the FDA. The success rates were 50.0%, 39.5%, 8.3%, 100.0% in phase I, II, III and registration phase respectively. The success rate from clinical studies to marketing was only 1.6 %, which is the last first ranking the various types of drug development success rate. The FDA is currently approved three cancer vaccines, which are Cervarix, Gardasil and Sipuleucel-T. The first two are the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Sipuleucel-T is really designed according to the principles of the vaccine. But because of defects in the clinical trial program, it is hard to estimate whether the drug could anticancer through a vaccine mechanism.

Overall speaking, cancer vaccines are the high risk areas in currently drug develop.

Numerologist Warda is hooked on OG-L002 fishing, collecting. And lastly her encouragement comes from socializing along with her companions.