Australians to run trials for new blood cancer drug

AUSTRALIAN scientists believe they have found a treatment for blood cancers that will spare patients the unpleasant side-effects of chemotherapy.

The new drug, which has shown promising results in mice, will be tested on patients with lymphoma and leukaemia at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne this year.

An Associate Professor, Ross Hannan, from the hospital, found a weakness in cancer cells that could be targeted to kill them while sparing healthy cells. The weakness is a process called ribosome biogenesis, which produces proteins essential for the growth and survival of all cells.

''We've demonstrated that cancer cells are far more dependent on their ability to make ribosomes than normal cells, and therefore, much more vulnerable if these 'protein factories' come under attack,'' he said of the research, published today in the journal Cancer Cell.

Advertisement

After working with an American pharmaceutical company, Associate Professor Hannan and his colleagues found a drug that could target this process, killing the cancer cells in mice with little effect on healthy cells.

A professor and co-head of the cancer therapeutics program at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Grant McArthur, said: ''This will hopefully lead to the eradication of lymphoma and leukaemia cells in patients.''

The rest is here:
Australians to run trials for new blood cancer drug