Fellow sufferers of CML may well find the attached article of interest.
Patients with chronic myeloid leukemia who maintain a complete molecular response after stopping imatinib treatment have evidence of persistent leukemia by DNA PCR
http://www.nature.com/leu/journal/v24/n10/abs/leu2010185a.html
The abstract is free to view but the full article requires a payment.
Regards
Andy
Dear Andy,
thanks for posting this abstract. It is very interesting that although extremely sensitive testing by this team of researchers (including T.Hughes/J.Melo-Adelaide) can still detect the presence of bcr/abl in all but one of the patients in the study- there is still some mechanism that keeps the positive cells under control and prevents them from proliferating, keeping patients in CCR without drug therapy.
Of course it might be that this 'natural' control mechanism will eventually fail and some patients will relapse after a few years, but none the less it is very significant step forward in understanding CML when treated over the long term with TKI's and therefore represents one more step forward towards a possible 'cure'.
Sandy
