text_1: Discovery offers prospect of shorter treatment and cure for chronic myelogenous leukemia
text_2: This news release by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is a teaser on a potential new drug target for sufferers of a blood cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, which affects 30,000 Americans a year. The release spends a good amount of space explaining the condition and problems with a standard treatment — a drug called Gleevec (a brand-name version of the drug imatinib) — and how up to 90% of patients with the disease face a lifetime of medication that may eventually stop working. It also does a nice job explaining a biological pathway that helps drive CML and why it might be a mechanism to target in the future, specifically Ezh2 inhibitors. However, the study was done in mice — not people. The release belatedly points this out in the final third of the text — but we would have liked to see it more prominently mentioned. The reason: The relevance may not transfer to people with CML. That’s also why we think the repeated use of the word “cure” and the possibility of shorter treatment in the headline is overstating and misleading. One glaring omission was that of price. The only allusion to price in the news release is an aside in the closing line noting shorter treatment times translate into cost savings. We’re also given no rough treatment cost estimates for an unnamed Ezh2 inhibitor made by Epizyme that’s mentioned in the release. Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) develops in bone marrow and affects myeloid cells. Those cells typically mature into platelets or red blood cells, but genetic and other abnormalities can lead them to mature into defunct granulocyte cells, i.e. leukemia. CML patients experience a gradual though sometimes rapid build-up of leukemia in their bones and then in their spleen, crowding out healthy cells over time. This drives symptoms that may include frequent infections (due to immune system weakening), fatigue (fewer red blood cells), and easy bleeding (fewer platelets). CML affects about 30,000 people each year and about 1.2 million to 1.5 million people worldwide, most of them middle-aged adults (though there are a few children). While patients who seek the standard of treatment — imatinib (marketed as Gleevec and Glivec) — receive it “indefinitely,” the median survival is between 5-6 years, since leukemia cells can build up resistance to imatinib-like drugs. In fact, about 80-90% of patients can’t clear all of their leukemia cells and stay on permanent drugs. By increasing the number of CML patients who can drive their cancer into remission, suffering could be dramatically reduced — as would the cost of their treatment. As teased by this release, Ezh2 inhibitors may (or may not) help CML patients. Clinical trials would have to determine if that hypothesis pans out.