Wonder drug Dasatinib gives hopes to leukemia patients

the drug Dasatinib raises hope in chronic myeloid leukemia patients as the elimination of the leukemia cells are better than Gleevec.

The company Bristol-Myers Squibb Co at Boston told the press that the drug Dasatinib has led to reduction in the number of patients with Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).

This drug is very effective in the decreasing the leukemia cells from the bone marrow than the previously used drug Gleevec.

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is usually presented in three different stages – Chronic stage, accelerated stage and the blast stage. Dasatinib was tried on all these stages of leukemia patients and the results were Out of the186 patients who are in the chronic stage, 45% of the patients attained complete elimination of the leukemia cells from the marrow.

Out of the 107 patients in the accelerated stage 31% who did not react to Gleevec responded positively to Dasatinib.

Out of the 74% in the blast stage (aggressive form) 29% of the patients attained complete elimination of the leukemia cells.

This is a boon to all those patients who do not react to Gleevec which is the treatment for Leukemia.

This drug will soon reach the markets by the end of the current year or the beginning of the next year.

Gleevec was a Swiss product and in 2001after approved by the Food and Drug Administration, made to the markets as the drug which attacks the BCR-ABL protein which results in the abnormal rise of leukocytes.

But with this drug some patients (20% of CML) did not respond to the drug or initially responded but later became resistant to the drug.

The mechanism of the drug action is that it attacks and prevents several proteins (BCR-ABL & SRC) in the same time. SRC is believed to help the leukemia cells to take the alternate pathway and become resistant to Gleevec, but Dasatinib prevents the action of SRC.

The toxicity level of Dasatinib is not more than Gleevec and it has to be brought in to the market for commercial use as the statistics show that in the current year the number of chronic CML patients to be 4600.

The company also relies on this drug to become the most famous cancer Drug Company and increase profit. It is estimated that this drug if put in circulation would yield six hundred million dollars to the company within a period of four years.