|  |  |  | | | | BREAKING CANCER RESISTANCE | | | | |
| |  Myeloma cells.
Release Date: 30th January 2003
Myeloma, a life-threatening cancer of the blood diagnosed in 3,000 people in Britain every year, is often very difficult to treat. The disease remains stubbornly resistant to most forms of chemotherapy.
Now British scientists and doctors believe they have come much closer to understanding why myeloma becomes resistant to a commonly used drug called Melphalan. It appears that myeloma cells can develop a mechanism to repair the damage to the cell caused by the chemotherapy. Their discovery could eventually enable the development of more effective treatments for the disease.
At present, the most effective form of treating myeloma patients - who are in a position to have this treatment - is a stem cell transplant using the patient’s own cells, an autologous transplant. To prepare patients for the transplant, they are treated with Melphalan to kill cancer cells in their bone marrow.
Professor John Hartley, who directs the research at the Royal Free and University College London Medical School, said: "While this combination of treatments has improved survival in myeloma patients, sadly nearly all patients relapse months or years later.
“Melphalan works by forming crosslinks between the two strands of DNA in each cell. This stops cancer cells from multiplying, because the DNA strands cannot unravel to replicate and form a new cell. In time, the cell will die.
"However, our work has shown that myeloma cells from patients in whom treatment has failed have the ability to undo these links enabling the cancer cells to survive,” he adds.
Professor Hartley and Dr Daniel Hochhauser from UCL, in collaboration with Dr Charles Craddock from Birmingham, have been awarded £140,000 by the Leukaemia Research Fund to take this work forward. "We need to investigate whether this mechanism also makes myeloma cells resistant to other drugs, and also to devise treatments to overcome this problem," Professor Hartley explained.
They will be testing two new approaches on myeloma cells in the laboratory: a new agent called SJG-136; and combining other anti-cancer drugs with Melphalan to overcome resistance.
Dr David Grant, Scientific Director of the Leukaemia Research Fund said: "This brings us one step closer to finding why patients do not respond to treatment for this terrible disease. This is translational science at its best, involving painstaking laboratory work and clinical collaboration at the highest level."
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