I was just reviewing some of the articles published on the 'Home' page and thought that this one, published in January last year, would be worth looking at again.
Sandy
"A bone drug already on the market for osteoporosis may kill chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) stem cells thought to persist in the bone marrow after standard therapy, lowering the likelihood of disease recurrence, according to a new study in mice led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.
The study, published in Nature Medicine, provides the first evidence in mice that altering the bone environment to make it inhospitable to leukemia stem cells can improve CML outcomes. Current CML treatments effectively target leukemia cells but not leukemia stem cells, and therefore the disease is rarely cured, the study authors said.........................
.........."Hope for a cure
The team went on to show that treating CML mice with a combination of PTH and imatinib mesylate eradicated the disease more often than treating mice with imatinib mesylate only.
“This discovery raises the hope of designing agents or using PTH itself, which is already an FDA-approved drug, to influence and manipulate the bone marrow environment for CML patients and try to cure them,” said Krause.
So far, the researchers had been working with the mouse equivalent of CML. To bring the experiments closer to a human system, they injected human CML stem cells into mice whose immune systems had been suppressed so they wouldn’t reject the foreign cells. PTH treatment worked once more; it reduced the number of CML stem cells that took hold in the mice’s bone marrow.
The team is now hoping to move toward human clinical trials to assess the use of PTH or a close equivalent for treating CML.........."
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2013/11/bone-drug-kills-leukemi...