December 05, 2007

Researchers at Rice University and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center announced this week that they have tweaked Gleevec, a powerful leukemia drug, to reduce its risk of causing a rare but potentially fatal cardiac side effect.

Using a new bottom-up approach for rational drug design, researchers at Rice University and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have re-engineered the powerful anticancer drug imatinib - best known by its brand name Gleevec - to more specifically target one type of cancer while potentially curbing a rare life-threatening cardiotoxic side effect. ...

"Imatinib actually affects an entire family of kinases beyond those examined here," said Gabriel Lopez-Berestein, a professor of experimental therapeutics at M. D. Anderson. "This is terrific proof of principle that we can enhance the selectivity of a drug by making a small but significant change in its structure and with precise synthesis and formulation of the new drug....It's a completely novel approach."

Kudos to the researchers for their groundbreaking efforts. For more discussion of the chemistry behind the discovery, see this article from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This is exacltly the kind of drug safety effort that industry and the FDA should be doing more to promote.

Posted by Paul Howard at December 5, 2007 01:22 PM

Comments

Post a comment