Any sort of breakthrough on cancer treatment is welcome. Not gonna turn down any good news on that front.
Leukemia being a particularly nasty version of it, this is doubly good news:
Terminal leukaemia patients who were not responding to treatment now have hope for a cure, thanks to a new experimental pill called revumenib.
This drug has completely eliminated cancer in a third of the participants in a long-awaited clinical trial in the United States.
Although not all patients showed complete remission, scientists remain hopeful as the results indicate that the pill might pave the way to a cure for leukaemia in the future.
I'm not trying to rain on the parade here, really I'm not, but just as an aside — they couldn't come up with a better name for the drug than "revumenib?"
Honestly I'm not sure I can even pronounce that.
But I digress. They can call it herka-derka-pilly-pill and it'll be good news. We've been waiting for a breakthrough like this for decades.
"We're incredibly hopeful by these results of patients that received this drug. This was their last chance," said study co-author Dr Ghayas Issa, a leukaemia physician at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
"They have progressed on multiple lines of therapy and a fraction of them, about half, had disappearance of their leukaemia cells from their bone marrow," he told Euronews Next.
The drug in question works "by reprogramming leukaemia cells back into normal cells," specifically in shutting down the hijacked process by which leukemia replicates itself. After patients take the drug, "leukaemia cells are turned back into normal cells."
The preliminary results showed that 53 per cent of patients responded to revumenib, and 30 per cent had a complete remission with no cancer detectable in their blood.
Based on the data from this trial, in December 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration granted revumenib "breakthrough therapy designation" to help fast-track its development and regulatory review.
