Discovery suggests possible treatment strategy for aggressive leukemias

The work appears in Nature online on July 18. Their findings implicate a protein called Mushashi that prevents cells from maturing, creating a large population of immature cells, which is one of the hallmarks of CML.

This same molecular pathway may also be related to other aggressive leukemias, as well as solid tumors like glioblastoma (a severe form of brain cancer) and breast cancer.

With collaborators at other institutions, the Duke team looked at 120 human specimens from patients representing different phases of CML progression. They found that Musashi levels increased dramatically as the disease became more aggressive.

"We found high levels of Musashi in all of the human advanced phase CML samples we studied," said senior author Tannishtha Reya, Ph.D., an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke.

"The fact that this pattern was seen in all of the human cells, regardless of patients' gender or ethnicity, and in people on three continents, marked it as potentially a major signal that needed to be studied in as much depth as possible," Reya said.

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