Benzene and Leukemia Lawyer & Attorney : Burke & Eisner Law Firm : Benzene Exposure, Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma

Canadian scientists are investigating a novel way of treating a deadly form of leukemia: By targeting the stem cells that allow the cancer to return after chemotherapy has resulted in apparent remission.

Using an experimental drug, researchers at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto were able to cure some mice transplanted with the human form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The discovery offers promise that the drug could have the same effect in humans with the disease.

Read more about this at the Source:  Yahoo News Canada

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A new study has found that survival rates among elderly patients affected by non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has increased by using a different treatment method.

The treatment involves cutting the standard chemotherapy time in half, but still using the same combination and doses of drugs and antibodies.

Dr Luke Coyle from Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital says the new, shorter burst of treatment has effective results.

"It's very exciting to have the scientific proof that you can do it better and you can treat patients in a shorter period of time, which will hopefully allow them to tolerate the procedure much better as well," he said.

"It's a very difficult thing in your life to have six months of therapy punctuated by regular hospital visits and hopefully this will perhaps be compressed into a much shorter period, perhaps three months."

He says the practice is now likely to be adopted in all Australian hospitals.

Source:  Yahoo News

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I found this article about a method for inhibiting leukemia cells. 

A team of researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center has discovered an entirely new mechanism of action for a novel pharmacological agent currently in clinical trials in patients - the kinase inhibitor BAY 43-9006 - which was designed to disrupt the survival pathways of tumor cells....

"We were surprised to find that the killing effects of Bay 43-9006 in human leukemia cells had very little to do with inhibition of the Raf-1 pathway," Grant said. "Instead, the major mechanism of lethality of this compound involved down-regulation of a protein known as Mcl-1, which plays a critical role in protecting leukemic cells from apoptosis.

Source:  Medicalnewstoday.com

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Found this link today on an AML treatment Genasense.  The company, Genta, released some information indicating that the drug appears to correlate with a particular molecule.  Read the article, but basically it means that they think that the Genasense does what it is designed to do when treating Acute Myelocytic Leukemia.

Source: RedNova Reports Show Correlations of Genasense(R) Levels With Target and Biomarker Effects in Patients With Acute Myelocytic Leukemia and Prostate Cancer

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CHAPEL HILL -- Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have identified an enzyme that helps trigger the development of leukemia, a cancer of blood cells.

The enzyme hDOT1L activates a set of genes that plays a key role in the rare and largely incurable acute myeloid leukemia (AML). This disease affects less than 2 percent of the estimated 16,000 individuals diagnosed with acute leukemia nationwide each year. The discovery, based on research using bone marrow cells from mice, offers a potential target for new drugs against this form of leukemia, the researchers said.

Source:  University of North Carolina Press Release

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A number of our clients have CML as a result of benzene exposure.  Many of them are on Gleevec and they find it very helpful.

A new compound may offer an alternative treatment for people with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) who are resistant to treatment with the drug Gleevec, according to two studies presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in Anaheim, Calif.

Source:  Yahoo News

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