New drug to treat leukemia with fewer side effects than existing drugs
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New drug to treat leukemia with fewer side effects than existing drugs.
Scientists have found two molecules that help treat leukemia that do far less damage to healthy cells than existing chemotherapy drugs.
These compounds work using a different mechanism, are more selective for cancer cells, and importantly, they have been used for other purposes.
Abnormal activity of an enzyme called DNMT3A, which has previously been implicated in acute myeloid leukemia, promotes the formation of abnormal blood cells.
Many current chemotherapy drugs work by disabling the enzyme DNMT3A — but unfortunately, they also interfere with the activity of DNMT1, a similar enzyme that plays an important role in healthy cells.
This leads to many of the toxic side effects experienced by patients receiving chemotherapy.
In the new study, the researchers investigated ways to target DNMT3A alone.
The enzyme is known to form complexes with “partner” proteins when it does its job, so the team scoured the chemical library of existing drugs until they found two that interfered with this partner’s cooperative process.
The two compounds, pyrazolone and pyridazine, target an inactive site on DNMT3A, which works by preventing it from forming a complex and ultimately preventing the cascade of effects that can lead to leukemia. Importantly, this mechanism means that it does not affect DNMT1.
The team said the breakthrough could pave the way for a new class of drugs that could eventually help treat leukemia and other forms of cancer with far less toxicity than existing chemotherapy drugs.
However, there is still a lot of work to be done to uncover how it works in the long term and how to make it more effective.
Thankfully, there’s one less hurdle in the process — because these drugs are already used for other diseases, getting them approved to treat leukemia should be an easier process.
The research was published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry .
Reference:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.2c00725
New drug to treat leukemia with fewer side effects than existing drugs.
(source:internet, reference only)
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