Expanding the therapeutic arsenal

From San Diego, at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology

Two experimental pills can send chronic myeloid leukemia into remission in some patients who don’t benefit from the best available medicine, early results from three studies show.

In many patients with this blood cancer, the genes encoding proteins called Bcr and Abl become fused. This genetic mutation results in a defective protein, Bcr-Abl, that causes runaway proliferation of white blood cells.