Leukemia drug combo is encouraging in early phase I clinical trial
Outcomes are typically poor f or older patients with advanced blood cancers, and new therapies are desperately needed to help patients with these cancers achieve remission," said Mark Frattini, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and blood cancer specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian. "While our study was small, the response we saw in this phase I, dose-escalating trial was encouraging." Previously, Frattini and colleagues had used a proprietary chemosensitivity screening assay to demonstrate that combining thioguanine and decitabine -- chemotherapy drugs that are commonly used as single agents to treat patients with AML -- restored therapeutic efficacy in leukemia cells from patients with relapsed and/or refractory disease. In this study, the researchers tested the efficacy of the combination therapy in 12 older patients (median age of 67 years) with relapsed or chemotherapy refractory AML or chronic myelomonocytic l...