European Inventor(s)of the Year 2009: Dr. Jurg Zimmerman and Brian Druker MD

Swiss medicinal chemist Dr Jürg Zimmermann along with US oncologist Dr Brian Druker won the award in the Industry category for his invention of the drug Glivec. Glivec has a 98% remission rate in people suffering from chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML) - a rare form of leukaemia that affects about 10,000 people every year.

CML was once considered one of the worst forms of cancer. The only treatment was a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy; both treatments are extremely painful and have many side effects, since the therapies attack healthy as well as cancerous cells. Glivec represents a breakthrough in cancer treatment as it only targets diseased cells.

Dr Zimmermann says of the drug, 'There are different forms of leukaemia and Glivec is being used for CML only. This is extremely important. I think this will be the new way of approaching medicine in the future. With a very specific diagnosis the success rate of Glivec is more than 95%. In the past, diagnosis was less specific and chemotherapy was very unselective - it worked by attacking all cells.'

Drs Zimmermann and Druker first began work on finding a cure for CML back in the late 1980s after the discovery by researchers in the US that 95% of patients with CML had an abnormally short chromosome. This leads to a DNA swap which creates a faulty signalling protein called BCR-ABL. The researchers began looking for inhibitors for BCR-ABL.

'During DNA replication, one piece of chromosome A swaps positions with chromosome B,' Dr Zimmermann told CORDIS News. 'Why this happens we don't know. In some cases it may be due to environmental factors, but in others it is probably just bad luck. Mistakes happen in the body all the time, but normally they are corrected. With a cancer cell the mistake isn't recognised.'

For patients, the lack of side effects is a remarkable benefit as they can avoid gruelling and painful courses of chemotherapy. As Dr Zimmermann notes, 'A lot of the attraction of Glivec for the clinicians is that it is so well tolerated. Patients often don't feel it at all. People suffer terribly from chemotherapy, but when we had the first clinical trials with Glivec, patients were saying, "Have you given me a placebo?" Some of the doctors immediately said that it couldn't be a cancer drug and that it would not work.'

Glivec did work, though. White blood cells in patients declined remarkably, side effects were almost non-existent and Glivec is now the first treatment given to all CML patients.

'We worked on a simple principle,' explained Dr Zimmermann. 'We looked at the difference between a cancer cell and a healthy cell and we researched into what drove the cancer cell that is not present in the healthy cell. That was the target.'

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