Old drug, new trick
By Ben Harder
From Atlanta, at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology
A team of researchers has plucked the first fruit of what the group’s leader calls a “new approach to drug discovery.” Scott A.
Armstrong of Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and his colleagues found that the drug rapamycin, in combination with standard chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), can kill chemotherapy-resistant cells.
Rapamycin is used to prevent rejection in transplant recipients. ALL is often treated with the steroid prednisone, but it’s sometimes resistant to that medicine.