by Keren Setton
JERUSALEM, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said they have developed a biological drug against acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with a success rate of 50 percent in the lab mice they tested.
The results were published last week in the biweekly scientific journal "Cell."
According to Professor Yinon Ben-Neriah, the researcher who led the team of scientists, the past decades have seen a stagnation in treatment of AML, which is considered an especially aggressive type of cancer.
Neriah is also an adjunct professor at the Institute of Immunology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
There are several subtypes of the disease with varying survival rates.
People with AML suffer from their bone marrow producing abnormal blood cells, resulting in a quick and deadly deterioration of health.
Traditional chemotherapy is often unsuccessful because the leukemic cells are able to overcome it.
"Leukemic cells are so flexible that anything you manage to target, something else replaces it and so on," Ben-Neriah told Xinhua.
The research focused on communication pathways between cells, while the aim was to increase the number of p53 cells in the sick mice.
P53 is a protein that acts as a tumor suppressor defending human cells from cancer. The molecules they created in the lab induced the production of p53.
"We found that the molecules not only enhance p53, but also weaken other proteins that work against p53," Ben-Neriah said.
"It works like a cluster bomb. It reaches many targets and eliminates many of them at once. The leukemic cells are impossible to compensate themselves anymore," the Israeli team leader explained.
However, Mark Levis, who works at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Maryland in the United States, is less optimistic.
"Curing cancer in a mouse is exceptionally easy," Levis told Xinhua.
According to Levis, the mice do not develop cancer like human patients, as the disease in mice is not quite the same as when it was found in humans.
Thus, clinical testing on human patients very often yield completely different results from what is seen at the lab. Few such drugs reach the finishing line.
"Most early phase trials fail," Levis said. "Things do not get translated very well. Science is rarely correctly translated into a clinical trial that really duplicates what has been done to the mice."
Despite being aware of these shortcomings, Neriah remains hopeful, calling his findings "dramatic," because among the mice cured by the drug without a relapse, half developed cancer-free stem cells.
"Now we are trying to understand the differences between the relapsed and non-relapsed mice and maybe find a clue to prevent the emergence of resistance and relapsing," Neriah told Xinhua.
But Levis warned that the claims are made just "in the early stages of drug development," and "genetic mutations in mice are far simpler and much easier to kill."
"Most lab findings remain in the lab," he noted.
The findings were published after 10 years of animal studies.
An American pharmaceutical firm has bought the patents for the production of the biological drug from Yissum, the technology transfer company of Hebrew University.
Neriah and the company are currently in the process of applying for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval for the first-phase clinical trials scheduled to begin early next year.
Although not one of the most prevalent cancers, AML is one of the most challenging diseases to treat, and produces extensive relevant research.
The disease also generates a lot of interest as it does not change the genetic code of a patient, rather the way that genes are expressed.
"It (AML) is a very good model to understand cancer progression," Neriah noted.
